The Forgotten Battle(Netflix, Dutch)
Directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr
Rating: *** ½
I remember my favourite movie critic Roger Ebert writing about the great David Lean’s failed 1970 love epic Ryan’s Daughter that the story was too lightweight to take the burden of Lean’s vision.
The opposite is true of The Forgotten Battle, a Dutch war epic set in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation in the World War 2. The enormity and scale of the drama is so imposing , they bear the full brunt of director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr’s ambitious direction .
Throughout the gripping drama, I gawked at the sheer vastness of the scale and the devastating dimensions of the story , the epic level of aesthetic articulation ,where the damned and the doomed did a death-defying dance.
The recreation of German-occupied Netherlands with all its frenetic tensions, is picture perfect ,pitched at a tone that is constantly powerful and persuasive. Most of all, The Forgotten Battle is an enormously entertaining war drama.Brutal and beautiful, savage and splendid, it is the kind of experience that we missed in the movie theatres even during the pre-Covid period. How many films did we see which justified the large-screen scale?The Forgotten Battle does, even if we watch it at home we can’t miss its director’s epic vision as conveyed in almost frame. The characters in the sprawling saga are way too vast in number to be mentioned .
What we cannot dismiss is the tonal tenacity that every character, big or small, brings to the panoramic plot, imbuing almost every moment with an urgency that transcends the tides of temporality .
How does one describe the epic drama’s characterizations? These are people struggling with their conscience during a time of tremendous hardship. Our heroine would have to be Teuntje(Susan Radder) who is reluctantly drawn into the Dutch resistance after her brother is brutally executed by the Nazis.
To me Teuntje and the conscience-stricken Dutch soldier Marinus(Gijs Blom) working for the Nazis, are the double voice of the conscience, grappling gloriously with their guilt while smothering their better judgement.
Elsewhere a bunch of British soldiers are marooned from civilization. They undergo their own physical emotional and spiritual struggle, a journey into darkness that seems to define every character.
The Forgotten Battle is an epic story told with a virility and sensitivity that put a tremendous artistic spin to the brutality all around. This is a great film not to be missed, never to be forgotten.