A man who has been having visions of an impending danger begins an affair with a woman who may lead him to his doom.
EN
“On page 102 of De Vierde Man Reve himself sighs ironically about the ‘unfilmability’ of the book: ‘Which master of film could take this theme and make it plausible?... Even for an incomprehensible, ‘experimental’ Italian film... the basic idea is too confused...’ In reality, Reve had written his Magic Realist thriller so transparently that new elements were easily added. Soeteman decided that it was possible to play on Reve’s obsession with the worship of the Madonna by contrasting the femme fatale Christine Halslag with a femme céleste in the form of Mary herself. For the necessary surreal images the director was able to draw upon his own spell as a painter, since it was precisely in that style that he had painted and drawn as a student at Leiden.”
Rob Van Scheers1
“Since the film does not resolve the status of the fantastic visions as either outrageous or as meaningful flash-forwards, the viewer gets caught in the deadlock of how to interpret the protagonist: either Gerard is paranoid, as the doctor believes, or he is a visionary who is truly open to the fantastic –which was his ironic definition of the essence of Catholicism. On these grounds, one might claim that with De vierde man, Verhoeven has performed a kind of ‘irony of irony’, in the spirit of Reve’s work. Seminal for this effectis that Verhoeven’s film consistently problematized the status of the dreams and hallucinations. As I indicated earler, Verhoeven refrained from employing formal means to help the viewer by using hard cuts throughout. In an attempt to explain that the film becomes a balancing act between the conventions of realism and surrealism, Verhoeven, as he told Van Scheers, decided to shoot in deep focus. According to the director, the foreground and background should be equally sharp; a shallow focus may ‘exclude reality’.”
Peter Verstraten2
