10s Movie Review - Rendez-Vous

Director: Antoinette Beumer
Genre: Thriller
Runtime: 100 minutes
Year: 2015
Starring: Loes Haverkort, Mark van Eeuwen, Pierre Boulanger, Peter Paul Muller, Jennifer Hoffman, Eva Duijvenstein
 
Description: Simone (Loes Haverkort) had a dream and achieving it didn’t seem that difficult. Or so she thought.

Review: The third novel by Dutch author Esther Verhoef is her first psychological thriller, turned into film by director Antoinette Beumer. Loes Haverkort plays leading character Simone. She is married to Eric and has two children. She is trying to find happiness with her family in France, where they renovate her late mother’s house and turn it into a bed and breakfast. For a thriller, there hardly is any tension.
When Simone runs into Michel, a handsome and charming French construction worker, she feels attracted to him. She goes after him, hesitating only briefly whether she is not putting all her family happiness at risk. It is also clear that Simone’s relationship with her mother was difficult. And she has a hard time adapting to France. Fellow Dutchman Peter helps her and Eric, even taking over the reins of the renovation. While Simone has a passionate affair with Michel, everything around her threatens to end in disaster.
Beumer obviously couldn’t decide what should be the main part of her book adaptation. Does it revolve around the messy practices surrounding the renovation and getting used to a strange environment or should Simone’s amorous explorations come first? There is an attempt to surround the village environment and the many Dutchmen who live in France with some mystique. But school mothers crying in cars, strange utterances at fairs, and the interpretation of the rich everybody’s friend and benefactor Peter hardly make a lasting impression.
The biggest shortcoming is the hardly plausible characterization of Simone. She is a woman who screams independence, but doesn’t actually make any decisions independently. Simone herself seems to realize what she is doing.
This combination of misjudgments in both the plot and character development is the final deathblow to this weak thriller. That doesn’t even feel like a thriller up until the last 20 minutes or so.

Rating: 2/ 5