Wat Zien Ik!?

EN

“When offered the chance to shoot a feature-length film in 35mm and in colour, Paul Verhoeven was delighted with the opportunity until the moment he heard that producer Rob Houwer wanted to make a ‘popular sex comedy’ based on the confessions of a prostitute, recorded by Albert Mol. Verhoeven felt he had to make a forced choice as in a hold-up (your money or your life). Naturally, he chose the ‘bad’ – going along with Houwer’s plan and to make the best of it – over the ‘worse’ option of declining the offer. He feared that he either had to give up directing at all or would be condemned to shoot ‘boring, navel-gazing, low-budget art films’ like his colleagues did.”

Peter Verstraten1

“The films Paul Verhoeven made in the early 1970s are helpful in understanding the dominant approach towards the representation of sex as liberating and proudly provocative. His debut feature Wat Zien Ik!? (1971) helped to create the image of the ‘happy hooker’. Greet’s male clients are pathetic types, and all of them are weird in comparison to the ‘normal’ Greet, our point of identification throughout the film. She joyfully participates in the sorts of theatre play that the odd whoremongers have invented for her, except when the man who wants her to walk and chuck like a chicken transgresses a limit for her. ‘Business is business’, according to one of the English titles in use for the film, but a comic tone towards sex prevails.”

Peter Verstraten2

“Although most of Wat Zien Ik!? is what would now be called ‘camp’, in 1971 what it had to offer was an entertaining and fast-moving story. The film was edited to increase the pace, scenes following each other so quickly that the viewer had no chance to escape, let alone think about what was being offered. If the director and his team were overcome by depression during the editing – a recurring experience – there was at least the one moment they all thought hysterically funny.”

Rob van Scheers3

• 1Peter Verstraten, Humour and Irony in Dutch Post-War Fiction Film (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 48.
• 2Peter Verstraten, Dutch Post-War Fiction Film through a Lens of Psychoanalysis (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 29.
• 3Rob Van Scheers, Paul Verhoeven, trans. Aletta Stevens (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), 75.