Character, winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1997, tells the story of a boy who grows up without his father, discovers him in his juvenile years, and wants to kill him by the time he becomes a man. In spite of the misery that father and son manufacture, their mutual will to win produces something greater than a soap opera scuffle—it shows the human spirit capable of honor in the midst of desperate searching and profound suffering.
The story transpires through the framework of a murder investigation. Witnesses see a bloodied young man emerge from a building where police find a dead man. Moments later, police arrest the young man, and two officers begin his cross-examination: the victim is Dreverhaven, the powerful town bailiff, and the suspect is Katadreuffe, his son.
As Katadreuffe reports his story, the film jumps to flashbacks. His mother Joba worked as housekeeper for Dreverhaven. She performed her tasks efficiently and inconspicuously, without ever speaking to the man. One day he notices her, however, and they mate off screen. Weeks later she announces her pregnancy and resignation in the same sentence. After she leaves him, he bombards her new residence with marriage proposals, but she refuses each one. Throughout his life, Dreverhaven continues to desire Joba, but she always remains outside his reach.
She gives birth to Katadreuffe, who as a schoolboy receives notes that say the same single word: bastard. The film occurs in the Rotterdam of the post-WWI 1900s, when communism carried underground popularity and single-mother families carried public disgrace. Despite this written ridicule, which also comes in physical and verbal forms, Katadreuffe hears nothing of his father. His relationship with his mother exists in silence. Despite her efforts, a nagging, almost instinctive curiosity leads the boy to discover the father he has never seen. Once they meet, the film attends to the story of their peculiar relationship, which becomes one of constant obsession, despite their infrequent interaction. Katadreuffe attempts to defeat his father by overcoming poverty; Dreverhaven opposes his son by making his every endeavor more difficult.
Though he seems to lack mercy, Dreverhaven is not a heartless man. When he enters a city battle zone to perform an eviction, a young boy fires a pistol at him, and one of the bullets grazes his face. Dreverhaven responds by trying to prevent officers from gunning down the boy. However infrequent it emerges, goodwill lies buried deep within him.
Normally Dreverhaven acts with harshness. In a latter episode, he tells the tenants of an apartment building he owns that they have three days to evacuate the premises. In a dream that anticipates making this announcement, he appears naked before his tenants, and they beat him to death. When the actual moment comes, even with the premonition of this dream, he still passes through the audience and mounts the podium to proclaim the three-day notice. For Dreverhaven, moments of peril amount to tests of his will: something inside him must confront its every obstacle in order to assert its nature—whether it's a war zone or the stage of his death. Though this sense of conduct overrules his sense of compassion, he bears his tenants no malice. His occupation makes him an instrument of the law, and his personal code resembles a virtuous legality. This is the very code that he aims to impart to his son, whether it kills him or not.
Consequently, when Dreverhaven's name comes up at the law firm where Katadreuffe works, employees debate whether his modus operandi is a virtue or vice, courage or recklessness. Even with these aforementioned traits, much mystery shrouds Dreverhaven. The film never enters his past to explain who he really is. In addition, it's never clear to Katadreuffe why his father treats him so: is he being punished because he represents the fruit of his father's one failure, or is he being taught a way of overcoming the world?
Though these lawyers remain divided on Dreverhaven, the ending addresses the remaining uncertainty. After the interrogation, there is no marriage to save the day—and there could have been a happy one. Instead, the end depicts a moment of recognition that amounts to so much more, to the very thing that Katadreuffe has been striving for, the thing that only a father can provide: identity.
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