FILM REVIEW: BRIDE FLIGHT

Frank (Waldemar Torenstra) and Esther (Anna Drjver) in Bride Flight.

Thresh beholdened

By Ed Rampell

Ben Sombogaart’s Bride Flight is a highly recommended adult movie. By this, I don’t mean that it’s porn – although it does have some eroticism and a glorious nude scene. Rather, I simply mean that this foreign film has mature subject matter and is for grownups who think. Bride Flight also has a fairly complex form that requires a sustained attention span, so it’s definitely not for mall rats intent on mindless action and escapism on multiplex screens. 

As its name implies, Bride Flight is indeed about wives-to-be who fly on the so-called “Last Great Air Race” from Europe to New Zealand back in 1953, when these globe straddling jaunts were very big adventures. The passengers aboard the KLM carrier that participated in and won this real life aerial contest included 40 Dutch immigrants, mostly women seeking to escape post-WWII Holland’s hardships by starting new lives at Christchurch, where their Dutch fiancés awaited them. A pretty offbeat premise, as far as plots are concerned.

The film focuses on three women and a man on this flight that, back in the 1950s, took days to make. Frank touches the lives of the trio, and although the émigrés’ existences become intertwined in their adapted country, they go on to lead very separate lives, yet remain intimately bound. In terms of Bride Flight’s complexity, it effortlessly shifts cinematically from past to present, so the romantic saga goes back and forth from the young to the aged immigrants. The technique requires viewers to focus on the unfolding saga, the way that Alain Resnais’ circa 1960 classics Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima, Mon Amour likewise bent time and continuity. 

Bride Flight therefore has two actors playing each major character -- 20-somethings for the new arrivals, seniors for the present day Dutch transplants. American audiences will be most familiar with the rugged Dutch action hero Rutger Hauer (1982’s Blade Runner, 2005’s Batman Begins, this year’s Hobo With a Shotgun) who portrays Frank. Waldemar Torenstra plays young Frank. Ada has married a religious zealot and is portrayed by nubile Karina Smulders, whose smoldering sex scene with Frank lights up the screen. Pleuni Touw depicts the older Ada.

As young Marjorie, Elise Schaap’s character makes the best marriage of the trio, although life tosses her a curveball, causing her to become obsessive and possessive. Petra Laseur plays petulant Marjorie as an older and perhaps wiser lady. Probably the most interesting character is Esther (Anna Drjver), a Jew who, unlike her family members, survived the Holocaust, although its lingering, PTSD-like effects continue, understandably, to haunt Esther. 

Esther retains a strong individualistic streak and along with the jealous Marjorie, shares a “deep dark secret.” Esther is a fashion designer. (Interestingly, Drjver is actually a runway model, so talk about tailor-made casting.) While movies and TV shows heavily favor certain professions -- crime fighters, doctors, journalists, attorneys and the like -- Frank’s career path is fairly unusual for motion picture protagonists, and another sign as to what an outstandingly unusual film Bride Flight is. 

Bride Flight's location shooting in New Zealand enhances the overall production, which is handsome to behold and drink in. Like most movies set and/or shot in the South Seas, the indigenous Islanders and their Islands serve mainly as backdrop for the really important doings of the Caucasoid stars. However, in Bride Flight it’s not even New Zealand’s dominant majority culture of white people or “Pakehas” of English origin who are featured; it’s a Dutch minority.

Nevertheless, this 130-minute, partially subtitled film is an excellent, well-crafted feature for auds who prefer their movies mature. Bride Flight is a realistic slice of life, albeit in an unusual milieu. Director Sombogaart’s Twin Sisters was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2004, and gazing into my crystal ball, I predict the same for Bride Flight, which has also earned some richly deserved prizes on the film festival circuit. Bride Flight, like fine wines, shows that films taste better when aged.