Aaron Rookus and Robbie van Brussel | P / 2014

the barbarians at the gate

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sakia Diesing (screenplay), Aaron Rookus and Robbie van Brussel (director) P / 2014 [10 minutes]

 

Throughout his films to date, Dutch filmmaker Aaron Rookus has been exploring the sexuality of children. But in this work he opens that search up to a complete study of family sexuality and the strange, almost psychotic work that open up those issues to comedic satire. In P it is almost as if Rookus has picked up where Chevy Chase’s National Lampoon family comedies (National Lampoon’s Vacation of 1983, National Lampoon’s European Vacation, 1985, and Nation Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, 1989) left off and revealed to contain even great perversities.

 

    A Dutch family has been traveling on a German vacation in their camper, and after terribly hot day of travel are all about to explode with terror, frustration and simple boredom from being shuttled about in the same space for so many days.

     The Mother (Rifka Lodeizen), who his pregnant (we later find out that her pregnancy is the product of man other than husband), is busy vomiting in a bag in the front seat, her husband (Koen De Graeve) looking on, as he drives, with a mix of horror and disgust. The Daughter (Yentl Meijer) behind them is busy carving some sort of stick into what appears as a kind Native American weapon, and the Son (Bas von Prooijen), in the next row of seats, is intensely listening to a porn movie. As if on signal, the Son and Daughter begin to fight. This is not a happy bunch.  

    Finally finding a place to stop, the Father pulls over, the Daughter leaps from the camper, and soon after begins heavily beating a metal garbage container, for what reason we’re not privy, but apparently simply out of pent-up anger and resentment.

     The Son goes wandering into the nearby woods where, to his great delight, he discovers a gay cruising ground with numerous older men engaged in fellatio and other sexual acts. He watches in amazement, as the men become equally turned-on with the ungainly boy with a red birthmark across one cheek so openly watching them.

 

     After handing her bag of vomit to her husband to take away, the Mother immediately gets on the cellphone to talk to her “secret” lover, explaining to him that she is about to abort his child, which apparently is not something with which he agrees given her responses, interrupted by her husband, staring back into the van in confusion, perhaps wondering with whom she might be having such an animated conversation.

       Meanwhile two policemen sit nearby in their car, simply observing this disastrous family having suddenly overrun their quiet rest spot. The police, male and female, finally get out of their car and go over to talk to the Father, complaining about his daughter’s strange behavior.

       To make it even worse, the Daughter drags her two-pronged divining rod dressed up in feathers over to a nearby motorcycle and begins slamming it into the bike’s lights, breaking them.

       The Son in the woods, becoming quite excited by the sexual acts he is witnessing, pulls out his cellphone to take a picture.

     The uncomfortable wife pulls off her bra, as the male policeman looks on through the camper window. In his frustration for the German’s list of complaints, the Father attempts to dismiss the whole matter with his hand, in the process spilling the male policeman’s coffee all over his shirt. A battle ensues as they attempt to arrest him, he admirably fighting back, the Mother soon getting out of the camper to join in on the brawl.

      By this point the two men the Son has been observing, upset with his photographs move toward him, probably simply to remove the photo, but he goes on the run, and a few moments later appears at the edge of the woods with a bear (a human kind, not the animal) attempting to restrain him. It looks to all as if the boy were being abducted, and the police immediately turn their attention to that incident, leaving the father free.

     The son escapes his gay restrainer and runs back to the family, as they all return to the camper and drive off, for one moment, at least, agreed on the course they must take.

       Out of the woods suddenly dozens of gay men come running from all directions, taking to their nearby parked cars, one poor gay man discovering his motorbike trashed.

       This series of comic yet transgressive incidents is so absurdly entertaining, that the idea struck me that it might have worked nicely as a TV series, the family swooping down on various small German communities to cause major chaos with regard to both the order and disorder, the police and criminals equally affected by their unholy presence. I love the concept—to steal the actor who plays the son’s last name—of the von Prooijen’s arrival causing major chaos across the orderly towns and cities of the German countryside. I can hear the cries now: “The von P’s are coming, the von P’s are coming!” Meanwhile, we have Rookus’ untidy little masterwork about a family that probably won’t last out their vacationing days before they spin off into the space of their quite wretched futures of unhappiness, yet for the moment are perfectly content for their escape.

 

Los Angeles, March 29, 2024

Reprinted from My Gay Cinema blog (March 2024).