Film Review: Devastated by Love, by Ari Deelder (2013)

Image: International Film Festival Rotterdam 2013

A new cool jazz tune introduces us to Arie in a surprising opening scene that forebodes the dreamy surrealistic nature of Devastated by Love (Toegetakeld door de liefde). And there couldn’t be a better start.

At first it feels as if it the audio and video didn’t match, when we see a dream about fame, where Arie, played wonderfully by Raymond Thiry,  lectures an invisible audience. But then, led by the suggestive tenor sax, who becomes a signature move during the film, we get immersed in his growing madness of love.

A writer whose lack of inspiration is turning his life black and white, Arie finds Sonja, the redhead streetcar driver, and engages a self-destructing process of silence and imagination that while he believes is getting closer to his beloved driver is actually making him become really obsessive.

Ari Deelder, in his first feature film, works his way into an already known topic focusing on the visuals and the music. The film is strongly based on the possibilities of the image, the color and the animation to achieve an intense but also comedic surrealism.

A beating heart here and an entire fighting sequence there, the animation quickly becomes the comic relief of a story that otherwise could be pretty depressing, since Arie ends up being nothing more than a stalker with a great dose of imagination.

But the actual narrator of Devastated by Love is the impressing cool jazz soundtrack, performed by the New Cool Collective. A fact, though, that turns to be double-edged by the end of the film, when we are already fed up with the character’s representative tune and the cooly and warm effects of the sax can’t cope with the fact that the story cannot go any further.

In a nutshell, a simple story that is capable to go into amusing reveries thanks to the use of the colour, the animation, the Gondryesque cardboard atrezzo details and the music, but that at the end becomes a little bit tedious as the surprise gets colder. And that may be one of the issues in the FIPRESCI Jury decision.

Devastated by Love (Toegetakeld door de liefde)
Directed by: Ari Deelder
Written by: Ari Deelder, based on a story by Aat Ceelen
Cast: Raymond Thiry, Anna Hermans, Stefan Degand, Leny Breederveld
90′, Netherlands, 2013