Director: Melle Posthuma de Boer & Ramses van Hall
Writer: Ramses van Hall
Cast: Samuel van Keeken, Ramses van Hall, Melle Posthuma de Boer, Merette van Hijfte, Olivier Fraikin, Anna van Keeken
Running time: 24mins
Going into this film, you might be forgiven for thinking it would be about Johnny (Samuel van Keeken). When you learn that the film was written and co-directed by the same person playing his parasitic brother (Ramses van Hall), you might also have nodded knowingly to yourself, ah, it’s that kind of a deal.
But while finding out that a film stars its writer and director is often a kiss of death – in the world of independent cinema and beyond – this is a long, long way from being a vanity project. The character of Niels is unflinchingly presented by Van Hall and his co-director Melle Posthuma de Boer as a manipulative loser – filled with bubbling resentments to the brother who he sees as little more than a muscular meal-ticket.
The film follows a mockumentary film crew, as they attempt to cover a make-or-break weekend for Johnny – a reluctant bodybuilder, who Niels has hounded into pursuing the dream of their late father, at the cost of his personal happiness. Soon, Johnny will contend a national bodybuilding championship, which Niels believes can be a springboard to bigger and better things – as well as a means to start hawking ‘wellness’ paraphernalia to the easily duped manosphere.
An initial interview foregrounds the pair’s relationship for the events to come. Johnny cuts a forlorn figure, an exasperated star of silent film, struggling to get a word in edgeways, while his nagging talkies-era manager pushes his way into the limelight – insisting that yes, this is exactly where Johnny wants to be.
Through it all, Van Hall carries himself as a nagging, twitching super-ego. He hectors and harries his speechless brother through every facet of his life, from what he eats, to the way he stands and moves – obsessing over minute details without taking a breath. And as it becomes clear Johnny actually wants to be a dancer, this overbearing presence only increases. It is a compelling performance, which in the hands of a different actor could have come across as cartoonishly evil – but here carries just the right sense of pathetic self-resentment that means we never lose sight of Niels as an unsympathetic, spiteful human being, rather than an omnipotent force of evil.
This is underlined by the authentic documentary-style cinematography of Jeroen Klokgieters, which delivers a fantastic fly-on-the-wall realism to capture Niels’ weaker moments. Dropping a fried snack on the floor and scrambling to retrieve it, becoming embroiled in a battle with washroom facilities, muttering a prayer to a photo of his father. At the same time, the editing of Luc van Baar carries a fantastic sense of comic timing, maintaining steady momentum between Niels’ cruellest moments, and the times in which he gets his just desserts, as if to suggest he is making himself the target of some great force of comedic-karmic justice.
Most importantly, though, Van Hall’s script is keen to subtly suggest – without condoning anything – that there are relatable reasons behind Niels’ behaviour. In particular, the film’s opening scene sees Johnny and Niels’ late father John (Olivier Fraikin) – an oafish amateur bodybuilder, who is caught in one clip doing steroids – tell a 90s camcorder that he wants his son to be named after him, and suggests he and his wife should only have one child. It seems likely Niels is also party to this information, and rather than processing that with the realisation his father was a jerk, it has festered into a determined quest to use the favourite child, Johnny, to obtain his father’s posthumous approval. Adopting all the worst traits of old John, Niels exacerbates his tightly-wound persona by using cocaine to heighten his senses – something which in practice makes him paranoid and prone to sabotaging his plan of managing a bodybuilding champion. This includes throwing ableist slurs out like they’re going out of fashion (they very much already have), comedically forgetting he is miked up during a drug deal, and trashing a paper-towel dispenser that he can’t get to work.
Van Keeken also deserves a great deal of credit as his silent foil – with Johnny quietly trying to warn Niels that something is wrong here. While Niels has bluntly already said his brother speaks with his body, not his mouth during their earlier car-crash interview, he seems completely blind to this physical language in several moments where Johnny flashes him a mournful glance in warning. One such moment comes at the bodybuilding championship, when Niels insists on applying extra coats of fake tan / creosote, the baleful Johnny looking on as he increasingly resembles a basted turkey. When the dye inevitably runs, leaving Johnny looking like a ripped Rudy Giuliani, his scores at the contest take a knock.
I don’t want to go into too much detail with what transpires after, but I would like to praise it for having been consistently built up by Van Hall’s script, and his performance as a deeply flawed, but recognisably human, antagonist. Safe to say, this is a film I recommend you seek out to see for yourself – and which you will be able to see at the annual IFL showcase in Amsterdam, this April.
One final point on the choice of format, though. There is a lot to tie up in the film’s final act – and I think viewing things through the lens of a documentary proves to be a canny move here. It allows for a necessary amount of exposition – because that’s just what they do in documentaries – to get the characters where they need to be in as little time as possible. And the time that saved is expertly used to convey an emotional conversion for Niels – who having seemed to be what Roland Barthes called the perfect bastard, completes a beautiful face-turn, finally realising what he was doing to his brother, and making peace with himself in the process.
Johnny is a bravura piece of tragi-comic storytelling. Its script patiently examines the makings of a ‘villain’, before breaking them down with farcical beats, and raw emotional clout. The directors have pulled off a brilliant balancing act in that regard – while the performers each come away with distinction. I sincerely hope this team will keep Indy Film Library in mind with their future releases – because they have built a believably farcical world that I would be happy to spend a lot longer than 24 minutes in.