Extremely Quiet & Incredibly Moving
Nicole van Kildonk‘s TAKING CHANCES is a kid’s movie treading some very dark territory in an affecting way.
Nicole van Kildonk‘s TAKING CHANCES
Kiek, the nine-year-old Dutch girl at the centre of TAKING CHANCES, has a mop of unruly dark hair that keeps falling upon her tiny triangle of a face, but never quite enough to hide her prematurely wise, hazel-brown eyes. The girl’s father is an army doctor about to leave on a mission to an unnamed country, and the child keeps asking him serious questions about his chances of survival.
She’s relentless and genuinely concerned: the adults try to feed her evasive answers, but she won’t have any of them. Once her father goes missing in action, her world becomes pervaded with a sense of dread and anxious anticipation of news – any news – about him.
Nicole van Kilsdonk’s movie, playing in the Berlinale Generation programme for children and young adults, is a surprisingly serious story of a child trying to incorporate the notion of death into her burgeoning mind. When Kiek learns that the chances of having one’s father die are small, she tries to diminish them still by buying a pet mouse who’d die “instead” of him. Through some twisted – if entirely believable – child logic of her own, she imagines that the more death surrounds her at home, the lesser the probability of her dad being hit by a stray bullet on the battlefield.
The film treads some tricky territory in a subtle way, involving black humour in the scenes of Kiek doing all she can to cause her pet mouse’s demise. Van Kilsdonk’s approach is both unflinching and playful, with many stop-motion animation sequences that illustrate Kiek’s fears, even tinging them with a surrealist streak.
The girl’s inner world gets more and more insular and aching, which is hauntingly rendered by the young actress Pippa Allen. Mid-way through the film, the tomboyish Kiek lands the lead role of Peter Pan, the ultimate reality-allergic character, in a school production, which she then rejects. Her need to face her fear has a pint-size gallantry all its own.
By portraying a child trying to wish away death by means of morbid game-playing, TAKING CHANCES resembles René Clément’s masterful 1952 FORBIDDEN GAMES, in which a pair of war-time orphans created a pet cemetery in order to cope with the historical nightmare taking place around them. Kiek’s situation is far less horrifying, but her father’s possible death remains equally acute.
In the end, the movie doesn’t opt for a cloying ending that would dismiss the girl’s anxieties. Even when death doesn’t win, its spectre never quite leaves the horizon.
301 Moved Permanently