For a Lost Soldier (Dutch: Voor een Verloren Soldaat) is a 1992 Dutch coming-of-ageromantic drama film directed by Roeland Kerbosch, based on the autobiographical novel of the same title by ballet dancer and choreographer Rudi van Dantzig. It is centered around an adult[1][2] Canadian soldier (Andrew Kelley) who meets a young Dutch boy (Maarten Smit) in rural 1945 Holland. They experience a romantic and sexual relationship during the liberation of the Netherlands from Nazi occupation.
Plot
In the 1980s, middle-aged ballet dancer/choreographer Jeroen is not satisfied with his dancers' interpretation of an autobiographical ballet which they are rehearsing. It is about his memories of Canada's liberation of the Netherlands from Nazi occupation back in 1945. In his office, Jeoren shows his colleague Laura a photo of himself as a 12- or 13-year-old with the foster family he spent the last year of World War II with. A document lying on his desk beside a pair of vintage sunglasses makes Laura realize he is in search of a WWII soldier called Walt. He decides to visit the village in which he lived with his foster family. He takes with him the pair of sunglasses and keeps having mental “conversations“ with his teenage self throughout the trip, during the first of which the plot switches back to 1944.
11- or 12-year-old Jeroen is sent by his mother to live with a foster family in the countryside in order to get enough to eat. Despite an administrative confusion leading to his foster parents being assigned him instead of a girl, as they wished, they act loving towards him. During the first night, he has a bed-wetting accident while sharing a bed with his foster parents' son, Henk, who is slightly older than him. Jeroen starts realizing he is gay. Towards the end of the war, a Canadian warplane crashes into the sea at the nearby beach and starts fascinating Jeroen. After he and his bisexual friend Jan unsuccessfully try to explore the sunken plane against the foster family's permission, Jan rapes Jeroen.
When an army of Canadian liberators enters the village, Jeroen and Walt, an adult Canadian soldier,[3] start flirting with each other. At a party the soldiers host, the two secretly dance with each other. Jeroen is smitten by him. When he and Walt coincidentally meet again, he accompanies him to the hotel where the soldiers are staying. Jeroen, Walt, some other soldiers and their female flirts later meet up at the beach. When the rest leaves, the pair walks while Walt tells Jeroen about his life despite the two not understanding each other's language. Jeroen shows Walt the crashed plane. Intending to get the jeep the soldiers are forced to share to get to explore the plane, the two return to the hotel. Since Walt's comrades turn out to have removed the jeep's distributor head to prevent him from taking it so that they can give the girls a ride, he goes inside to steal it back. After finding it, he decides to take a shower before returning to Jeroen, whom he told to wait outside the building. Jeroen sneaks into his room, and the two have sex.
When approached by Jan the following Sunday, Jeroen shows more self-confidence than before and successfully defends himself against another attempt at sexual assault. He and Walt meet again at the Sunday service. After mass, Walt and Jeroen explore the plane wreck, and Walt gives his boyfriend a driving lesson. While Walt is asleep after the two have had sex again, Jeroen grabs his photos and secretly puts one showing him alone in his uniform in his own shirt's pocket. When Jeroen gets home late from school, Walt turns out to be waiting for him in his foster family's garden in order to take a photo of them. Jeroen is disappointed that Walt cannot be in the photo due to taking it, so he tells Jeroen to put his identification tag around the neck of a scarecrow behind him and make it pose as his "double". Moments later, though, Walt's comrades arrive with their girlfriends and suggest to take a photo of him and his boyfriend amidst the latter's foster family. While trying to develop the photos, Jeroen accidentally destroys the negative. He comforts Walt, who is upset about the loss of the photo, by telling him they will always remain together. Walt, meanwhile, does not have the heart to reveal that he and his comrades are leaving tomorrow. When taking Jeroen home that night, Walt waits until he is gone inside. He then tries to ask Jeroen's foster father Hait to tell Jeroen what he cannot bring himself to say, but Hait does not understand him.
When Jeroen hears a conversation between the elder of his foster sisters and a friend, he finds out the army has left. Devastated, he pushes his younger foster sister off her bike and uses it to search for Walt. Returning home at night, a defeated Jeroen realizes the laundry his elder foster sister is hanging up contains the shirt in which he hid Walt's photo, which is now ruined. Heartbroken, Jeroen is woken up by a storm that night and sees part of the scarecrow shining through the window, causing him to believe it is still wearing Walt's tag; running outside and grabbing for it, he impales his hand on the barb wire around the scarecrow and is found by Hait, whom his scream has woken up. When Hait burns the scarecrow the following morning, he finds Walt's sunglasses, which he forgot in their garden after taking their photos. When a letter which Jeroen receives later turns out to be not from Walt but from his own mother, he sits down by the sea crying and is joined by Hait, to whom he reveals what is going on. When his mother comes to take him back home, Hait secretly puts the films from Walt's camera in Jeroen's suitcase and gives the sunglasses to Jeroen's mom to "give them to him at a later time". As they leave, the plane is revealed to have been hung up to dry, and Hait asks Jeroen to send him one of the photos of them together. Recalling how heartbroken his teenage self was on the ferry he took to leave the village, adult Jeroen mentally tells him he does not remember hearing Hait say that; his teenage self answers that he did hear it, but, lovesick, forced himself to forget everything that had happened in that place.
Back in the present, a happy Jeroen encourages his dancers during their final rehearsal. As he watches them dance, Laura hands him an envelope. It contains an enlarged version of the photo of himself and his foster family which he previously handed to Laura. Underneath it is a zoom of Walt's identification tag, revealing his contact information.
Despite its controversial themes, Kerbosch said that the film was broadly accepted. "In Holland, audiences just took it as a love story," he said. "And that's also what happened in New York, because it's a love story, a beautiful and romantic one at that."[4]
Stephen Holden of The New York Times praised the film's "refusal to load the story with contemporary psychological and social baggage" but wrote that the film was unable to achieve a "coherent dramatic frame". He added that the film does not insinuate Walt was responsible for harming Jeroen or had abused Jeroen, and also that within the work "is no mention of homosexuality."[2]
Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote that due to a lack of clarity over the homosexual themes, it "delves into issues far too serious and controversial for such questions to go unanswered." He also stated that the confusion over language, as the film is partially in English and partially in Dutch, may have caused "lacks crucial clarity", despite good acting.[5]
While Desmond Ryan of The Philadelphia Inquirer called the film "an acutely observed portrait of adolescent yearning", he criticized the film's opaque ending, saying, "What was evenhanded becomes simply open-ended."[6]
The North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), a pedophilia advocacy organization, praised the film, focusing on the relationship between the adult and child. "We see man and boy kissing, stripping naked, showering, climbing under the covers. There is one long, lovingly photographed close-up of the boy's face as the soldier, lying upon him, penetrates him anally. All of this is handled in perfect taste, of necessity with a minimum of words, since the boy speaks little English and the soldier no Dutch." NAMBLA used the film to justify pedophilic relationships, comparing the fight against child abuse and pedophilia to the persecution of "Jew[s], Gypsy[s], and homosexual[s]."[7]
References
^Kerbosch, Roeland (7 May 1993), Voor een verloren soldaat (Drama, Romance, War), Maarten Smit, Andrew Kelley, Jeroen Krabbé, Sigma Film Productions, Algemene Vereniging Radio Omroep (AVRO), retrieved 23 March 2024
