Joren Molter | Dòst (Dust) / 2018

there is nothing in kropsdam

by Douglas Messerli

 

Britt Snel and Matthijs van der Veer (screenplay), Joren Molter (director) Dòst (Dust) / 2018 [41 minutes] [TV movie]

 

Appearing on Dutch television, Joren Molter’s Dust almost approaches a feature film at 41 minutes, and most certainly it has the depth and heft of a longer film.

     This is a story, told so very often in LGBTQ+ movies, about a provincial love that simply because of the world in which it takes place cannot possibly survive. In this case the someone mentally challenged Alko (Henk Jan Doornbosch) and Björn (Liam Feikens) are best friends, and have been clearly from childhood. There is most clearly a love between them which perhaps they both only slightly recognize.

      Besides this is not a world of same-sex love, but of heterosexual normality, with Alko participating in dirt cart dragging, a constant discussion of girls, and possible kisses. Agricultural Netherlands is not the place for a deep love of two boys.

     The movie begins with a down-and-dirty ride through the mud on small open carts hooked up to what appear to be small go-carts. Alko wins the race to the surprise of his friends. He is hugged by Björn and cheered on by the others, despite their general disparagement of him.

      Their conversation is basically about their first kiss by a female, which one of them, when asked, replies, his mother, insisting that all of his friends were probably first kissed by the mothers.

       Here, they grow white asparagus for the world’s best tables, and you see the boys working the fields, carefully pulling up the tender stalks.

       A local girl, Marie (Yamila Huft), clearly interested in Alko, challenges him to an asparagus spear sucking content, in which both of them attempt to put the still quite dirty spears in their mouths, pushing it down as far as they can, obviously imitating the process of sucking a cock. The girl wins this contest.

       And, in some respects. Of these teenage relationships are about contests, who can first kiss a woman? Who can first have sex? Almost everything in this world is a challenge and a game, and if you’re aren’t up for it, you are mocked by your peers.

      Alko evidently eats regularly with Björn and his parents, beforehand which they wash up, helping each other, sometimes playfully, but often tenderly, with their grooming.

       Potato stew is generally the fare.

       Early on in this story, as provincial boys of this age often do, they practice French kissing together since, as Björn insists, the girls expect it, and now Alko has a date with the spear-sucking champion. They begin by simply darting out their tongues between their fingers, but soon explore each other’s fingers, putting a smile on their faces.

     The date between Alko and his new girlfriend goes mildly well, she attempting to explain to him once again how to kiss.

     Soon after, Björn and Alko explore masturbation to learn how it might feel with a girl, Björn jacking his friend off. He dare not show how much he enjoys it. And in that single act, moreover, something has changed. Alko now cleans himself alone, Björn given a turn in the bathroom without the sharing rapport of earlier.

    Alko shows up for a date with Marie, who on this strange date literally bicycles with her heavy-weight friend sitting behind her, through the flat-lands of provincial Holland, facing the head-winds.

     They break into the local swimming pool, now closed, play silly games, and mostly eat, clearly a pleasure they both share. But finally, through a piece of red licorice, which they share from opposite ends, she gets him to kiss her, evening opening up her zipper so that he can put his hands on her vagina. But when he tries to take a condom out of his billfold, she forbids him: “When I’m sixteen.”

    The game-playing, the challenges, the awards are again demanded and promised for any heterosexual boy.

      Now Alko hardly even talks to his former friend, asking only if he knows when Marie’s birthday is. The others boys bicycle past shouting, “Alko, Björn: Lien (Benthe Horlings) is again kissing in the trailer anyone who wants to.” 

      A bit like the whore in Fellini’s movies who titillate young men, Lientje, although much younger, literally chalks up her kissing conquests by scratching the numbers upon her walls. Björn enters first, she kissing him and declaring he was the best.

     But she herself is still only a child, the kissing game is still child’s play despite the fact she is French-kissing all the boys. Oddly, Alko doesn’t even bother with Lientje, since, presumably, he now has his own girlfriend.

      Now, at a local bar they celebrate Björn’s conquest of the local kisser, drinking at a bar, topping beer evidently with what appears to be whipping cream. When he refuses to drink, the boys all ask “Are you a man or a woman,” gender demanding, quite obviously, a certain kind of behavior.

         They each swallow down their drinks, some in one gulp, while Björn stands watching, an outsider to their activities. It is clear that he has begun to recognize the he is not whatever the male models are in his community.

      With the peer pressure upon him, and former teasing for being gay, Alko moves on to become friends with the rowdy group. When Lien shows up behind the bar to ask if Björn has something tasty for her, as Björn walks off.

         As Marie and Alko dance, she whispers that she will be sixteen tomorrow. Björn quickly shifts the music to something that can’t be slow-danced to.

        It’s clear he is hurt and frustrated by the inevitable shift of his boyhood friend’s attention, no matter how Alko may try to remain at least somewhat friendly. And it’s also quite clear now that Björn, the true outsider as perhaps a gay boy, feels betrayed by his friend Alko, surely never a lover, real or imaginary, but someone upon he could count as true friend and companion. That betrayal is what so often hits the gay boy or girl in the provincial worlds in which they grow up. There is ultimately no one there any longer to depend upon.

      Gay boys, recognizing also that they can never be friends with the most popular and successful boys of their crowd seek out those also ostracized or ignored by the society in which they live. Certainly, that was my experience, seeking out friendships with my peers that were not entirely satisfying to either of us. One of my friends, when he discovered I was gay, completely cut me off. Others simply moved away into heterosexual marriages and disappeared from my life as I knew they would. They were temporary friendships formed out of desperation and desire for the other relationships I knew might cost me painful abuse in their mockery and refusals to even imagine a friendship. We gay men do this to ourselves in small-town or rural areas in order to survive, but we also know at the very same moment that our relationships are lies, imaginary replacements for beautiful boys we might wish but fear to seek out.

        In Molter’s work, Alko is the epitome of the gay female hag, a boy friend (not a boyfriend) that serves as a temporary stand-in for what might someday be. But the betrayal hurts as much as if he were the one someone Björn is really attempting to befriend.

    Accordingly, when such friendships collapse, there is not only the pain of the loss, but the recognition of one’s own delusions and, you might even describe it, a kind of abusive friendship that mattered only through accident and coincidence. Moreover, Björn perceives his friend is no champion, now a part of the heterosexual crowd, but a confused youth who has been convinced that finding a girl will answer all of his problems and bring him into the general crowd.

      It’s enough to make a grown man cry. And I did.

    When Alko, worried about the state of his former friend, puts his arm around him to comfort him, Björn leans in for a kiss. Alko kisses him back, but we know and he knows this truly means the end of the relationship. Björn is a fag.

     For the rest of his days Alko will join the rowdy, heavily drinking local party boys, with no room in his life for real love and friendship.

      Björn even goes further, stopping by Alko’s house apologizing for last night and suggesting that if he wants he can “hit him.” Alko’s mild “it’s okay,” however, is in someways even worse, a kind of false forgiveness that never again result in their possibly being together.

    Alko buys a treat of decorated pears for Marie’s birthday. But others have seen Björn’s kiss, and Marie now accuses him of being gay and will have nothing to do with him, bicycling off when, at the old pool, he has attempted to meet up with her so they might finally celebrate her 16th birthday.

    The other boys equally now abuse Alko for being queer and he is mocked by the very ones with whom he thought he might have joined in the club of hormonal heterosexual admiration. Björn, realizing what has happened, can no longer have anything to do with Alko, nor that boy with his former friend. The breach has been made by the community who have outlawed both as perverts. Working side-by-side with the other boys, it is Alko wo receives the brunt of behavioral betrayal, called a faggot. Björn has apparently long been seen to have been “different,” but now one of their own has shown they cannot trust him as a friend, even though he has long been treated with mockery.

     When he attempts to explain to Marie what the situation is, she gives him the finger.

     The entry back into so-called teen normality, once someone is perceived as having left it, is terribly difficult, if not impossible. The truck home from the fields leaves both Alko and Björn behind.

     When Alko returns to the bar, they all scream that Alko is here. For a moment he is pleased, but when the song begins “If you don’t jump now you’re a faggot,” he realizes it is another attempt to mock him. But this boy, never a deep thinker, does begin to jump, even though soon after he is held down by two others.

     The next day at work, when Björn attempts to comfort him in his dejected state, Alko finally screams out to keep his hands off him, to stop trying to French kiss him, etc., screaming out and pushing him away for all to hear that he is not interested.

      All stop work in the midst of their washing and cutting the white asparagus for shipping, as  Björn leaves, no other choice allowed.

      The next day, his so-called friends are attacking another young man (who probably is Björn) for being a dirty faggot. Alko observing it briefly, walks off in another direction.

      Finally, rejected still by Marie, he accuses her, as she makes out with another man, of getting half-raped, which leads the other boys, given the context of his and her words, to presume that it was he who was “half-raped” by Björn, and they go after the gay boy again. Alko hardly resists their actions.

      When they ask if he touched him, Alko cannot respond. And they assume the worst. We have seen the masturbation sequence, a truly innocent act given their ages.

      Björn’s fellow works explode a soccer ball through his windows, Alko contributing to the general chaos, and running away with the rest of them like scared rabbits. Alko is now one of “them,” but he has no longer any place to run to. He will always be suspect in the local community, and he no longer has any escape of friendship with Björn and his family.

      We last see Reinert and the other bully boys on their way to a group field party, drinking small, hotel-like containers of alcohol. They celebrate the may pole, again noting its phallic significance. Singing, as the flames of their usual bonfires go off, about how there is nothing “in Kropsdam,” their imaginary community which director Joren Molter takes up as a subject in another film.

      As Alko watches, he spots Björn with another man, his old friend holding up a young child an showing him love, as he stands alone, finally joining in on the son “There is nothing in Kropsdam.” Clearly there is nothing there any longer for him, where Björn has evidently found a loving community.

      If Moler’s film is not a great work of art, it certainly comes close to it in its bringing up of terribly profound issues about how to live in a world intolerant of gay beings. We might presume that Björn will soon move away and find a new life for himself, while Alko and his gang must remain in Kropsdam, trapped in their nothingness.

Los Angeles, July 27, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).