STILL ON TRACK
 The Detour is the story of a young woman´s obsession with a charismatic older man.
Semi-autobiographical, it is Dutch director Frouke Fokkema´s third film - and making it is anything but a detour as far as Sigma Pictures´ Matthijs van Heijningen is concerned.
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the detour
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early 20 years ago, Dutch director Frouke Fokkema made her first trip to Gmunden in Austria to visit the acclaimed Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. It was a defining moment in her life and one to which she has returned more than once, initially in her 1981 stage play, De omweg (The Detour); then, more recently last summer, when she directed a screen version.
The Detour is Fokkema´s third feature, following Kracht (Vigour), the story of the relationship between a farmer and a (female) artist from the city who turns up on his farm, which won the Grand Prix du Jury at the Women´s Film Festival in Créteil in 1991; and Wildgroei (It Will Never Be Spring), about a woman writer telling her bizarre love story to two elderly men, which was in the Critics Weeks at Cannes in 1994. Like Fokkema´s first two films, The Detour is about obsession, but it promises to be the most intense of the three. And it is almost certainly the most autobiographical.
Joana de Vries, the heroine - played by rising young Dutch actress Tamar van den Dop, star of the Dutch Oscar-winner Karakter (Character) and one of the ‘European Shooting Stars´ at last year´s Berlin Film Festival - sets off to visit her lover in the Pyrenees. But - just like writer/director Fokkema 20 years before her - she makes a detour to Austria to meet the writer Thomas Bernhard (played in the film by Joachim Bissmeier, since the real-life writer died in 1989).
Willeke van Ammelrooy and Jan Decleir - stars of Dutch Oscar-winner Antonia’s Line - play Joana’s parents
in The Detour.
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Very much in the Central European literary tradition, Bernhard´s works deal with suicidal urges, loneliness and the impossibility of human contact. Not surprisingly, then, Joana´s initial encounter with the elderly writer appears anything but fruitful: close contact is not something he welcomes.
So Joana sets off for the Pyrenees, plunging into a relationship with a goatherd called Camille (played by Dutch actor Thom Hoffman, who starred in Fokkema´s second film, Wildgroei). He is everything that Bernhard is not, and sexual fulfilment is no problem. But he soon comes to realise that Joana is completely obsessed with Bernhard and the relationship disintegrates.
She heads back to Vienna and declares her love for Bernhard, whose only comment is that whatever comes around always goes away again. Years later, though, he is forced to admit that, in Joana´s case, this was not true: she hadn´t forgotten him. And, like him, she had gone on to become a writer.
“It´s the story of a quest for identity,” says Matthijs van Heijningen, who has produced all three of Fokkema´s films for his Sigma Pictures, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 1999. “The girl tries to find herself through a father figure. And the film is about the universal cycle of attraction and repulsion - about the impossibility of ever really getting close to another human being.”
The professional relationship between director Fokkema and producer van Heijningen is typical of the latter´s approach to films and film-making. In the quarter-century in which he has been running Sigma, personal films, frequently by women directors, have been at the core of the company´s output. And that, with The Detour, reaches 30 feature films - a figure that few independent European producers (and even fewer Dutch ones) can equal.
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