Film

Abel (1985)

Director: Alex Van Warmerdam

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Abel is a spoilt, possibly retarded, certainly eccentric 31-year-old mummy's boy whose suffocating relationship with his mother is balanced by the constant torment which father and son inflict on each other. A final rift occurs over a TV set (father refuses to have one, mother and son smuggle a set into the loft), and Abel is booted out into the streets. Father finds solace at an establishment called 'Naked Girls', where he picks up Zus (the voluptuous Malherbe) but Abel also stumbles upon Zus, is seduced, and shares her bohemian lifestyle...Van Warmerdam, who also stars as gormless Abel, directs with brash, colourful simplicity, evidently on a minute budget. The film is self-consciously quirky, and while some of the non-stop visual jokes hit the right note of irrational oddness, others are silly and contrived. But at least it has a distinctive flavour, and some scenes display a flair for social satire. Wittily comic or tiresome, according to taste.

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