Director: John Post
Running time: 56mins
You wait a lifetime for a supremely nerdy hour-long documentary on historical model making, and two come along at once. Like Dinoman, which I reviewed earlier this week, The Model Maker: Constant Willems follows a single-minded Dutch artist, who tirelessly builds a gigantic piece of art from tiny, complex materials, and like Jeroen Stultiens before him, director John Post has also managed to build the multitude of disparate clips from more than five years of filming into an inescapably engaging piece of storytelling. That is where the similarities end, though.
In stark contrast to the maverick artistry of Dinoman and the gonzo-editing of its filmmaker, The Model Maker: Constant Willems instead hinges on a subject with a meticulous eye for detail, and a director who takes a similarly measured methodical approach to putting together his completed piece of work.
At the beginning of the film, we are introduced to Constant Willems, a model maker from the Dutch city of Zutphen. He has been tasked with building a medieval replica of the city, as it would have been in 1485. Apparently, this was the city’s heyday, when its geographical positioning at an intersection of two of the country’s most important waterways made it a booming trade hub.
This is no small undertaking – especially for a man who is well into his sixties – but from the very onset, it is clear that there is little doubt he will complete the project; it is just a matter of when. Having received the commission from the local authorities in the first year of the pandemic, he has been able to work pretty consistently on the city from his apartment, and clearly takes a huge amount of pleasure from witnessing the progress he has made.
However, he never gets carried away with himself. When he speaks, it is with clear-eyed precision – one which is probably extremely beneficial to someone in his line of work – and that means that as much as it might be easy to talking another enthusiast into working themselves into the ground, he is clear that he does not work to deadline.
While it is entirely understandable that Willems would work that way, it does present the film with a slight problem. There is not an awful lot of jeopardy at play here – and if the hope was to create a documentary that would attract people (other than lunatics like myself) to this very niche topic of hyper-local history, there will not be a lot for them to get their teeth into in terms of tension. Even when the model makes its inevitable journey to its final resting place in the local museum – via a car-ride over a cobbled street, down several flights of stairs, and just barely scraping through several doors – the veneer of precision never comes close to slipping. Everyone is completely unflappable – through moments which I can only imagine internally would leave everyone on the verge of a breakdown.
It is here that I think Post’s choice to broadly keep himself out of his own film is a slight issue. While it has been pointed out before that artists leaving too many of their fingerprints on their work can mean audiences feel patronised, or babied into reaching certain conclusions, a contrary problem comes when laissez faire filmmaking does not try to help us engage with some otherwise aloof subjects. Post might have found time to speak to Willems before or during the transportation about his fears for the process – and to outline what the best and worst-case scenarios here are.
Likewise, there are also missed opportunities to give us better insight into why Willems has such a love of his craft in the first place. Aside from brushing over a brief recollection of childhood encounters with model towns, it is hard to really get to grips with what the creations he has completed since really mean to him. It might have been a good idea to show us more of those old creations, to have talked about their successes and failures, in order to help us get what is emotionally at stake for Willems in this project. He could also have been asked what he thinks will happen to this art form after his time is done. It is a bit of an elephant in the room – as is the fact we don’t speak in detail to his life-partner on what she makes of his obsession.
With that being said, however, there is a lot to love about the story that still manages to unfold. From the potted history of Zutphen – including the kind of insane facts you can only get from localised history, such as a brief provincial war being waged over access to a footbridge, or pirates plaguing the quaint waterways of medieval Holland – to the sweet moments of affection shown by Willems’ long-suffering wife, as she supports him through the final push of what could be his last big project.
There is even a brief cameo from an uncharacteristically elated Maarten van Rossem (a notoriously grumpy television historian, and co-host of De Slimste Mens) introducing the film – and coming dangerously close to smiling. And by the end of this film, if you have been bitten by the bug, you’ll be right there with him on this one. I certainly was.
John Post has put together a polished, clear narrative here – which deservedly commits an unashamedly niche subject to film, preserving what may well be a dying art form for future generations to enjoy. It is a reflection of Constant Willems’ own work in that regard. For that same reason, though, it does seem to lack a little warmth, or a little tension, to help humanise its topic when preaching to anyone beyond the converted.