Social worker-turned-feature film dramatist Mijke de Jong illustrates the old adage that time heals all wounds with this semi-improvised domestic drama charting the complicated divorce of an unhappily couple, and the effect of the impassioned break-up on their troubled 17-year-old son. Roos (Elsie de Brauw) and Martin (Marcel Musters) are two middle-aged intellectuals who have spent years attempting to make their marriage work, only to realize that no amount of compromise will compensate for
their irreconcilable differences. Unable to be alone in the same room due to the volatile emotions that erupt when they attempt to find a common ground, the fractured couple carries on bickering as their adolescent son, Isaac (Stijn Koomen), falls into a dangerous pattern of juvenile delinquency. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi
The phrase 'divorced couple' sounds like an oxymoron, but there's really no other way to describe the Dutch ex-spouses whose table talk dominates Stages.
De Jong's technique of filming conversations with the camera latched onto one character for minutes at a time is both disorienting and almost suffocatingly intimate.
An admirably spare and forthright chamber piece about divorce and its painful central theme receives a mysterious, beautiful and eventually hopeful counterpoint.
Like an episode out of Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, Stages distills the essence of a divorce into a few select moments. This Dutch import is hardly groundbreaking, but it captures human beings in existential crisis better than ma
Director Mijke de Jong employs a fractured style to match the personalities of its characters, but this synchronicity isn't so much heartfelt as it is solipsistic.
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