Drie dagen vis is a wonderful inversion of the Steptoe trope – an ageing father desperate to escape to somewhere warm and exciting, while his son desperately tries to hang on to him. But the warm, gentle humour of Peter Hoogendoorn’s film has much more to say about the nuances of familial relationships than that – delivering a precious message for anyone feeling distanced from their loved ones in modern Europe.
Across Europe, the relationship between parents and their children has been in a state of constant flux over the last four generations. I have gone into detail about the way the evolution and dismantling of the welfare state has placed unprecedented pressure on people who become trapped as the sole carer of their parents – and how that has been represented in the revival of a Steptoe & Son tradition in independent cinema.
That is, of course, a bit of an oversimplification. As Maarten de Bruijne pointed out when I spoke to him about his telling of this kind of tale, L’audition de Jeanne, one of the things he found most important in writing the film was that there were no “villains” of the piece – and that whatever the outcome, there would be “no winners”. But while there might be a good deal more sympathy and nuance in stories like L’Audition de Jeanne or De vlieger wacht niet, these are still ultimately explorations of children who have grown up under a nagging parental superego, who they now find themselves beholden to out of a mixture of guilt and responsibility – resentfully watching their own dreams fade in the process.
Drie dagen vis is a bittersweet, slice-of-life story, about a very different kind of father-son dynamic; but in the end, it also finds itself examining the increasingly fraught lines relationships between two generations, which have been strained by the changing world around them. In writer and director Peter Hoogendoorn’s second feature film, we follow a father and son who, rather than not having enough space, find themselves with too much of it – and struggle to connect with each other as a result. If you have migrated in your lifetime, it’s a phenomenon you may be familiar with.
Gerrie (Ton Kas) lives in Portugal with his wife – but once a year, he makes the trek back to Rotterdam, to have his lungs checked by his doctor. It is a scenario which earlier in Gerrie’s lifetime would have been unthinkable – but the advent of the European Union has enabled a cross-border retirement that on paper, sounds like a dream. In practice, though, he has found he is not equipped to deal with many of the emotional pulls it has resulted in.
Had Dick been born a decade later, in a time where travel across the continent was more normalised and affordable, this might not have been the case. Old connections might have had more inclination to keep up with him. His children might have also been raised with expectations to follow him out of the country more regularly.
Instead, surviving friends are either too frail, or lack the interest to head out to Portugal to visit him. And his family remaining in the Netherlands either lack the time or money to head out their regularly. In this largely one-way relationship, Gerrie finds it harder to connect to his old life, in a way he clearly has not legislated for.
Colleagues have retired and passed away, without anyone bothering to inform him. Old houses have been occupied by new tenants. Former partners have moved on. Burial plots have even lapsed. And with each event, Gerrie finds it harder to justify his obligation to return. This sense of disconnection has also come to characterise his relationship with his son, Dick (Guido Pollemans) – something which serves as the core theme of the film.
Kas and Pollemans are both on excellent form, when it comes to echoing each other’s postures and expressions – and cinematographer Gregg Telussa’s black-and-white imagery manages to maximise their mimicry, as they stand next to each other shooting the same surly stare into the mid-distance, or adopt the same stance sitting on either side of a door at the dentists, even when they cannot see each other. But to make things difficult, their similarities also extend to their personalities – with both utterly incapable of speaking directly about their feelings. As close as they are – either in terms of their habits, or the physical proximity – they often feel worlds apart emotionally.
That isn’t for a lack of trying, on either front. It’s just that time and distance have come between them to disrupt their connection – in a way that might not have been the case, had Gerrie not moved away.
Dick spends much of the film trailing in his father’s wake, like an awestruck child desperate to earn the approval of his seemingly all-powerful parent. He follows him across the country, for doctor and dentist appointments, for rural birthday celebrations with ageing strangers, and for ill-fated reunions with bus-station employees. All the while, he ceaselessly trundles out facts about life and culture, or opinions on the value of chairs (he has an app for this) to show his father that he is now a knowledgeable and intelligent adult.
Gerrie meanwhile defaults to the ultimate currency of ageing relatives: the micro-bung. On more than one occasion, he swoops in to try and palm off the odd €50 bill to Dick – for a taxi, a dental bill, or just because. Both men are, in their own way, trying to say something important. It’s just that time and distance have come between them to disrupt their connection – and left them on completely different wavelengths.
This builds frustration, which ultimately comes to a head when it finally comes to light that Gerrie intends to fully register in Portugal – making this his final trip back to Rotterdam. Illustrating just how socially inept he is, while he might feel he is being discreet about his decision, he has been so conspicuously guarded about things throughout his visit, that for the longest time we – and Dick – have assumed he may be terminally ill. His obsession with trips to the doctors, and his guarded answers about his time there, mean when the time comes to reveal what he is actually concealing, it almost feels worse.
It is hard for me to say why Gerrie kept his decision back – my Dutch is admittedly appalling, and my screening did not have English subtitles – be it because he was afraid of his reaction, or, amid Dick’s constant babbling about other subjects, he genuinely thought he wouldn’t care. Dick, on the other hand, seems easier to estimate here. Having seen his best efforts to impress his father largely fall flat, might have the feeling that rather than putting on a brave face, his father was trying to sneak away – and utterly disconnect with him.
The assumptions of either man would be incorrect, in that case. But the pause in their interactions after two packed days does seem to allow the pair of them to both realise what the other was doing – and appreciate that while neither of them is a great communicator, they are saying what matters in their own way. This leads to a beautiful last scene, reminiscent of the train-station farewells of classic cinema.
Whether or not this is the last time they see each other, there seems to be something new or revived between Dick and Gerrie. For all the space between them – and their generations still attaching a sense of finality to cross-continental travel – they will be together in some way. Neither of the men seems quite capable of taking that final leap (there is no Hollywood embrace, where they finally verbalise their love for one-another), but Kas and Pollemans again present a touching portrayal of two men doing their best, and recognising that in each other.
In our own lives, we might get closer than that to really expressing ourselves to our parents – even when we drift apart, across cities, countries, continents. But on some level, this is intensely relatable – beyond trying our best, the tricks and trappings of human expression mean there is no perfect reconciliation, no familial relationship where we can fully disclose our feelings. Appreciating the common ground of our flawed efforts in that case might be something we have to make peace with, if we are to appreciate each other.