Director: Pieter Hussaarts
Writer: Pieter Hussaarts
Cast: Ties Jansen, Falke De Smet, Coralie Ransbotyn, Wilma Borghuis-Albus, Bernard Kappelle, Samuel Willemsen
Running time: 16mins
I have said before, sometimes artists get a little too into their process, and mistake it for something inherently interesting. And in a world where we are plagued by a resurgent industry of biopics and documentaries placing the tortured artist at their centre, it is easy to see why creatives might fall into that trap. After all, if everyone from Dylan Thomas to Bob Dylan gets a film about their struggles, who wouldn’t want to hear about how I’m plagued by creative impotence?
But while I was ready to write off BLOCKED from the outset – assuming it was yet another writer with nothing to say using a story about writer’s block as a get-out-of-jail-free card – this was far from the 16 minutes of watching paint dry I was expecting. Instead, writer-director Pieter Hussaarts serves up an intense, claustrophobic encounter between a young writer struggling for ideas, and an endless stream of the most insufferable armchair critics you could imagine – and dares us to watch.
The resulting car-crash of a conversation is relentlessly (and appropriately) cringe-inducing, helped by the immaculate work of casting director Claudia Minardi. Here, she has assembled the perfect rogue’s gallery of literary snobs. I don’t mean to confuse the actors for their parts – each deserves credit for the uniquely terrible personality they are channelling, rather than berating as that personality – but in all my years with IFL, I have never seen such a deeply unlikeable set of performances.
Possibly most insufferable is Coralie Ransbotyn. If constantly chewing gum mid-sentence weren’t obnoxious enough, as the character credited as ‘French-speaking Woman’, you might have guessed (as a hangover of historic Norman imperialism) she takes every chance she gets to remind everyone she can speak French. And yes, that means she understands art and culturebetter than the rest of you commoners.
Reaching similar highs/lows is Samuel Willemsen as ‘Copywriter’. Living up to all the warnings signs a man under 40 in a flat-cap and gold-rimmed spectacles flashes you when he approaches, the smirking, smug Copywriter immediately takes his lack of professional fulfilment out on another aspiring writer by gutting every third-word of his tentative draft. The kind of guy who really wants you to know he has read Orwell’s six rules for writing (but has usually skipped the final point), everything has to be as blunt and literal as possible – and that just so happens to be the way the same way his clients require him to strip any fun or inventive phrases from his corporate copy. So, in a way, he’s already a real writer…
These are just two of the gaggle of critics who invade the table Brian (Ties Jansen) is hiding away in, as he struggles to progress with his short story. And keep in mind, this isn’t a fully-fledged manuscript he is amending, or even a full draft. This is the ‘scribbling ideas in a notebook’ stage. So, while publishing art might be opening yourself up for critique – if you don’t want to be part of a dialogue, you shouldn’t release your art publicly – this is an uninvited barrage of personal attacks. To bully your way into someone’s notebook and start issuing ‘feedback’ is to invade their interior, and go to war with their most private thoughts.
Anyone who has gone through any aspect of the creative process will understand just how upsetting the prospect of this disturbance is. And (hopefully) they know that until you believe your idea is ready, you’re well within your rights to tell people to fuck off, if they try to pry their way into your rough-and-ready sketches. But of course, this is an abstract scenario, and Hussaarts is not interested in letting us escape so easily. To his credit, in a scenario which would deal critical psychic damage to anyone unable to escape, Hussaarts’ script manages to find new ways to make it unbearable.
Unfortunately, in many ways, Blocked is a victim of its own success. The ensemble of grotesques the production has put together are so pure in their malevolence, that they cease to feel real. And meanwhile, Hussaarts feels unwilling to admit that this could be a fantastical scenario – where these uninvited tormentors are actually part of Brian’s unconscious mind. In fact, one moment – which would usually present a break where Brian returns to reality to find himself alone – actively seems to subvert this expectation.
In this case, the film feels like it crosses its own line, to become as cynical as the ‘critics’ it has dreamed up. Because if they aren’t two-dimensional caricatures dreamt up by a paranoid creator, imagining the ways society would eviscerate a story he isn’t that confident in, they come across as bitter and resentful misrepresentations of real people.
The thing is, someone might be a tedious know-it-all, who beats people over the head with their ability to speak two languages, and they might have shoddy table manners. Or they might be a hack who tramples over other people’s ideas reflexively, even though they know as little as the person they are ‘advising’. But they are still a living person, with hopes, dreams and anxieties of their own. There is an opportunity to examine with that, and to shift dynamics in the conversation, here – which goes begging.
Granted, in under 20 minutes, that would be difficult to pull off convincingly. But in that case, I would also argue you could just simplify this, and – even if you think it’s cliché – suggest this is all Brian’s inner dialogue, rather than a real-life assault on his personal space. Then again, I’m not a ‘writer’ either. Being a film critic is a long way from paying my bills, and I certainly don’t create my own stories. As someone whose day-job remains the least inspiring business journalism you can imagine, what do I know?
There are also a couple of disappointing notes in the film’s technical aspects. The film is crying out for some visual flare, but the cinematography does little to elevate what we see, beyond a nuts-and-bolts recording of a stage play. Meanwhile, stock music of non-descript jazz is unimaginative as a choice of audio that is supposed to underline the pretentious nature of the space we are in. But this is a film about writing, words are its bread and butter – and on that basis, it is a top performer. Hussaarts’ script is filled with sneering disdain, while the cast do an excellent job of delivering it, making us as uncomfortable as the hapless main, from start to finish.
