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Women's Noise

Bach Speed: Veerle Van Overloop in "Antonia's Line"

Matriarchy is as boring as patriarchy in 'Antonia's Line'

By Richard von Busack

A fairy-tale vision of 50 years of country living, Antonia's Line tells mostly of Antonia (Willeke Van Ammelrooy), an unmarried farmer who reviews her life on the day of her death, remembering how, soon after the end of World War II, she brought her daughter, Danielle (Els Dottermans), back to her home town.

They returned to claim the family farm from her mother; the daughter gave birth to her own daughter; and so forth. Together, the family brought love and kindness to a rural town where previously "men's loud voices ran roughshod over the women's silence"--as if there was nothing but noise in the one, and nothing but wisdom in the other.

The farm living is straight from a cereal commercial. The men in the picture are rapists or cowed nonentities, there to aid women in the production of scores of beautiful, well-behaved babies through sex that's a slightly more earthy version of the Immaculate Conception. Antonia herself manages to pencil in a once-a-week fling for recreational purposes. (This may all be sauce for the gander, though--men in the audience will know exactly what it's like for women to watch movies where a woman's only line of dialogue is "Be careful.")

Director/writer Marleen Gorris made the breakthrough picture A Question of Silence, and there are flashes of a hard-edged sensibility through the sweetness. Antonia's Line features an intellectual character, Crooked Finger (Mil Seghers), named for his habit of beckoning students into his library. He eventually dies of angst, however, with passages from his beloved Schopenhauer in his suicide note.

Gorris includes a sort of rural smartness in a tombstone for Platonic lovers: "They did not share a table; they did not share a bed. Now they only share a grave." There is also some easy anticlericalism in the form of a priest turned apostate who "could not reconcile his love of life with the church's love of death."

The advantage of Antonia's Line over Fried Green Tomatoes, for instance, is that at least it doesn't tease you to death with lesbian possibilities. The character who discovers her love of women acts on it safely and sanely, in a scene as completely free of sexual tension as the eye could behold. The ecstasies of those who love life can be very hard to watch, as hard to watch as the pregnant women here who exult in pregnancy fit to induce morning sickness in the viewer.

If you find matriarchy as cinematically boring as patriarchy, you'll probably want to go elsewhere. Still, the crowd that blissed out over Fried Green Tomatoes may be ready for another such rapture--but the occasional show of smartness that disguises Antonia's Line makes it, paradoxically, even more meretricious than Fannie Flagg on film.

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Antonia's Line (Unrated; 103 min.), directed and written by Marleen Gorris, photographed by Willy Stassen and starring Willeke Van Ammelrooy and Els Dottermans.


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