SUPERNOVA is based on the prize-winning young adult novel Mijn vader zegt dat wij levens redden (We save lives, my father says) by Flemish author Bo van Ranst. Tamar van den Dop follows up her debut film BLIND (2007) with this adaptation which enjoyed its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, and screens at the 34th Cambridge Film Festival this year.
Tamar van den Dop is not afraid to stray from traditional narrative. Her talent for dialogue-free exposition, her way with sexual tension and her sense of humour all share the style of Pasolini – who brought bathos to Bach in ACCATONE just as van den Dop mingles the majestic and the mundane in SUPERNOVA.
Teenager Meis lives with her slob father (Bob Schwarze) her distrait, controlling mother (van den Dop), and her trembling grandmother (Helga Boettiger) who is mutely mourning for her husband. Their isolated country house sits next to an accident blackspot: a sharp turn in the country road which regularly sends cars hurtling helplessly towards the house. The conceit is at once Beckettian and Ballardian – Meis actively wishes for the concrete twist to send new life crashing into her dilapidated, fly-blown limbo. But is the family saving lives or waiting to be saved?
Meis has a passion for physics – the laws that guide movement, energy and as the film’s title suggests, astronomy. Her preoccupation with the glorious dynamics of heavenly bodies aligns with the 15 year old’s rapacious trajectory towards womanhood. Van den Dop warps and foments Meis’ sexuality in the heat and cabin fever of her home, challenging us with the twisted comedy of scenes in which she shows her breasts to her father to illustrate her biology homework; or vies with her mother for the attention of a young stranger (David Schutter).
… When the country road finally throws up a prince for Meis, she tells him, “There’s nothing here”…
The charismatic and versatile new Dutch actor Gaite Jansen (THE PRICE OF SUGAR) transcends her character’s adolescent cynicism and ennui, evincing an existential vulnerability in her voice-over which bears the narrative aloft and allows it to breathe. Van den Dop juxtaposes the turmoil of the teenager with the mid-life crises of the parents and the tragic decrepitude of the grandmother – each one facing the futility of their own existence. At times, though, van den Dop seems to rely too heavily on her young lead, and even to take her strength for granted. For a film which is so preoccupied with scientific allegory and Newtonian notions of inertia and acceleration, it’s a shame that co-editor Katarina Turler did not quite bring the portentious momentum needed in post-production.
Meis kills time, waiting for the next crash. She scales the house in her mother’s high heels and rules the roof. She relives sex scenes from “doktersromans” – pulp romance novels set in hospitals – and muses on grandiose astronomical phenomena. She pays illicit visits to the half-completed bridge whence her grandfather fell and drowned in the Elbe canal. She deliberately lies down in the spot which her grandfather marked out as a potential crash site – willing the next collision to happen. And when the country road finally throws up a prince for Meis, she tells him, “There’s nothing here”. Van der Dop constantly reminds us in SUPERNOVA that anticipation holds far more power than the climax.
Van den Dop cites Terrence Malick as one of her heroes, and his influence shines through in Meis’ dry voiceover, and the stark landscape she inhabits. Cinematographer Gregor Meerman brings a sense of Wild West isolation to the little house in the verdant Dutch flatlands, and the Western flavour is augmented by sound designer Giel van Geloven who creates a Sergio Leone style soundscape of lazy flies and creaking fences, against a blues-infused soundtrack.
The takeaway scene of the film finds Meis listless on a riverbank, from where she spies a young man on a passing containership. He could be any Tom, Dick or Harry… or “Brad”, Meis’ shorthand for a dream lover. He sprints down the deck, trying to cheat the laws of physics and prolong the encounter. Finally, Meis has glimpsed and been glimpsed by the outside world, and tasted the promise of escape.
SUPERNOVA screens on August 29th at the Cambridge Film Festival.
httpvh://youtu.be/PHlHv2hITXc