Michiel Dhont | Holiday / 2019

family reunion

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michiel Dhont (screenwriter and director) Holiday / 2019 [24 minutes]

 

Flemish director Michiel Dhont’s short film Holiday is not so much a film with a plot as a series

of images which establish an atmosphere, basically filled with unknowable emotions of frustration, expressions of slights, personal dismissals, and resentments that any family build up over the years.

      The elders have all learned, long ago, to ignore the others’ comments, to hold back their anger, and go along with the pretense that an annual family get-together entails. But the younger Maurice, now 26, is just at the age where he is not yet ready to give into mass amnesia of family behavior and old to outwardly express his pent-up emotions. Tijmen Govaerts as Maurice is represented by a face of distress in varying degrees of horror as his grandmother, mother, brother Louis, aunts, uncles, and cousins all behave in a manner that makes him feel as if he has entered another planet, just close enough to what he knows, however, to provide him with a nightmare of a weekend.

    Very little except his uncle Luc’s (Jan Hammenecker) snide comment about his earring is actually directed toward him. And even Luc’s comment, “You have earring?” might be perceived simply as an observation where it not that clearly Maurice has faced just such uneasy “observations” for years from loud and provocative uncle, and comes with what are his apparently conservative values. Moreover, as Luc well knows, men have been wearing earrings by the time of this event, for years.

      Throughout the weekend, Maurice finds dozens of such small asides and behavior patterns that build up almost to an unbearable tension with which, although we cannot always be fully unsympathetic we have all been through at family gatherings at a certain age that drove us nearly crazy.

     Maurice reminds his mother that they had all agreed to invite no in-laws, yet Luc has brought his wife Isa (Circé Lethem). Maurice, on the other hand, even apologizes to Isa for his aunt Chantal’s (Sofie Decleir) crude comment about the fact that Isa is too old to bear a child. Isa simply says that she knows Chantal too well to take it seriously. Yet she continues to confide in Maurice about her and Luc’s attempt to have a baby, when Maurice knows that long ago his uncle was sterilized. His mother warns him not to intrude upon other people’s private fantasies.

      At another point, Maurice feels it necessary to stand up for his gay brother Louis (Oscar Willems) when at the dinner table when his uncle Joris (Dries Notelteirs) asks Louis, “Don’t you regret you can’t have children,” Maurice responding, “Being gay doesn’t mean you can’t have children.” The family once more quickly covers over their tracks with a simple, “Joris didn’t mean it like that?” “Like what?” one wants to ask, and “What then, did he mean by the question?” But nothing in this family is ever fully discussed.

 

     Maurice finally gets furious when he discovers that Luc has taken Louis out in Maurice’s car to give him a driving lesson. Maurice quickly joins the party, playing the role, quite literally of backseat driver. But Luc apparently is a staunch believer of live and let learn as he continually allows Louis to grind the gears and he is unable to learn the proper procedure of changing gears. Luc, moreover, attempts to turn brother against brother as he continues to tell Louis to ignore Maurice’s instructions. Maurice finally gets out of the car, orders his brother out, and insists the two walk home alone, leaving Luc to return the car.

       Even his attempt to be nice to Isa as he encourages her to buy a pair of cheap sunglasses for herself, is rebuffed. As she drives home with Maurice in the car, she gets out for a moment to take a call from her sister, obviously reporting that it appears she has cancer; returning to the auto she complains how she resents that when her sister calls it becomes an immediate demand to answer. She too evidently cannot acknowledge the sad news she has just been told.

     The final assault is when a younger cousin Roxanne (Melody van Gompel) decides to perform a dance before the assembled family. What begins as a seeming cheerleader routine turns moment by moment into something closer to a pole bar stripper routine, as the young teen tosses off her sweater and heaves her body up and down upon the floor to a song with lyrics which keep repeating the word “pussy,” “soft pussy.”

      By the end of the weekend, it is clear that Maurice has come to the point that so many of us have with regard to family life, realizing finally that such family reunions are made in hell. For the moment Maurice feels such a complete alienation that in a few years, he too will be able to utterly ignore the absurd behavior of those who remain of his family at just such future events, where they will perhaps be able to tease him about his righteousness.

      In that sense, I believe one must understand Michiel Dont’s beautifully realized work as less a dark family satire filled with lies and secrets than as comedy about coming to terms with family life.

     I can’t tell you how many times when dealing with just such events I felt very much in the same position as Maurice.

 

Los Angeles, September 13, 2023 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).