15 Drama out of a crisis In IFFR

IFFR Tiger Competition Drama Girl Vincent Boy Kars

“She is clever and just as curious about the life/art dichotomy that she is experiencing”

Drama out of a crisis

Vincent Boy Kars

In IFFR Tiger Competition selection Drama Girl, Dutch director Vincent Boy Kars rewrites the life story of a young woman, and then asks the same woman to play herself in its retelling on screen.

It all started with a16-hour interview in the summer of 2018 when Leyla de Muynck told director Kars everything about her life, and that of her parents even before she was born. This text formed the basis of the story that the director set out to retell, but on his terms and with little by way of further input from Leyla.

The film, which received Film Fund selective support and aKNF Award Special Mention at IFFR, concentrates on the past five years of Leyla’s life, when she has to deal with the death of her father, falling in and out of love, and arguments with her mother.

Leyla is not an actress (rather, askilled freeform dancer) but her onscreen parents are powerhouse Dutch thespians Pierre Bokma and Elsie de Brauw, whom we see introduced to Leyla on set for the first time, to her rising consternation and bemusement. Likewise, her onscreen boyfriend is played by established Dutch talent Jonas Mulders.

Initially Leyla is given latitude to advise on how her parents/boyfriend should be portrayed, but once we get into the action, she must react to (and act within) the severe constraints that the script imposes, and the emotional grenades that Kars continually lobs her way.

As aviewing experience, this is in equal part fascinating, moving, psychologically challenging and emotionally wrenching as she is forced to apply her performance skills to a fictionalised, and therefore at times unrecognisable, version of her own life story.

And of course, all this is cinematic gold dust for director Kars. “The moments when she is struggling, those are the moments for me that are the most exciting. She is in the construct of afiction scene, but she is not acting, she is. You have afiction scene with an actor but the main character is her, and pulling real emotions out of herself. And she was also in real life struggling with her memory [of events]. The struggle was real… The last thing I wanted was apolished performance.”

Not that Leyla is any way unaware that she is part of anexperiment. She is clever and just as curious about the life/art dichotomy that she is experiencing. “That is the reason why I chose to work with her. She is adancer and aperformer, but as an artist she is also interested in the differences between her as aperformer and her as herself, and what is real and what is fake in her performance. She is interested as amaker in the same questions that I am.”

There is acore scene in the film where Leyla and Mulders, looking like apair of beautiful aliens with matching cropped hair and dressed in garish colours, contemplate their lives while sitting on the bonnet of acar. For Kars, the gods were smiling at that moment as the weather performs acomplete volte face, pouring down one moment to bright sunshine the next (as if directed), and the actors don’t miss abeat. “That scene by the car, you cannot do that again. I always wanted to see Leyla’s first reaction on everything, so 80% of the film was one-takes. They knew to continue acting through the scene.”

The film, to be released in The Netherlands by Periscoop Film, is located in Rotterdam which enabled Kars to find fascinating interiors and exteriors (he scouted on his bike), and the electronic music score by Beau Zwart is mesmerising.

Leyla performs her own transformation when she asks Mulders to crop her long curly hair on camera, a process that always seems the ultimate sacrifice for an actor. “But that was real,” comments Kars. “She cut her hair in real life two days after her father passed away, so it was part of her story. Alot of things in the film you think are fictionalised, but alot more things are not.” Nick Cunningham