Mention the origins of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the discussion will inevitably revolve around Huub Bals, the maverick publicist-turned-programmer who masterminded the ascent of a once-marginal cultural event into one of the most renowned platforms for leftfield cinema. But in The House of Janus, director Keng Sen Ong approaches the festival’s origin story from a different angle.
The film was cowritten by Adriaan van der Staay, a visionary municipal official who championed the use of cinema (alongside architecture and poetry) as the engine for urban renewal in Rotterdam, van der Staay was the man who gave Bals his big break by asking him to help draft proposals which would eventually give birth to IFFR. With his decade-long tenure as the director of the Rotterdam Arts Foundation and his later involvement with the founding and operations of the city’s myriad galleries and museums, van der Staay is perhaps the unsung hero for the Dutch port-city’s cultural renaissance in the 1960s and 1970s. A documentary about his work and his views in arts and culture is long overdue.
The House of Janus, however, is not that film. While the now 91-year-old yet still very robust van der Staay is nearly omnipresent in the film, he is seen or heard mostly recalling the construction and upkeeping of his beloved summer villa in the Italian countryside.
While van der Staay’s commentaries could still be considered as worthy observations about rural Italian architecture and garden landscapes – the nonagenarian has pivoted into this field after his departure from cultural policy-making around the end of the 1990s – his insightful recollections are largely rendered secondary by director Keng Sen Ong’s attempt to play up the unseen and largely unspoken emotional bonds between the villa and its soon-to-depart owner.
Mostly known for his work as the artistic director of Singapore’s premier contemporary theatre collective T:>Works, Ong somehow mirrors van der Staay’s affections for his rural retreat with the mythical romance between the Trojan warrior Aeneas and his forced separation from his lover Dido. Given the tranquility of the Umbrian landscape on show and van der Staay’s largely soft-spoken demeanour, Ong’s allegory is as audacious as it is overwrought. Or is it really representative of a hidden aspect of van der Staay’s character that only the director himself knows?
We’ll never really get to the bottom of that by watching The House of Janus, which received its world premiere in the Singapore International Film Festival’s experimental Undercurrents section. While we see Ong cleaning the house, having candlelight dinners and enjoying the summer sunshine with van der Staay, the director has somehow decided against providing any context whatsoever about his friend’s colourful background or personality.
It’s not even very clear whether van der Staay really does see his fading relationship with his architectural brainchild as similar to the melodramatic parting of Dido and Aeneas. Rather, The House of Janus could (or should) actually be seen as the product of Ong’s own fascination with that fiery and doomed romance, and a corollary of his recent stage adaptation of Henry Purcell’s 17th century opera about the two mythical figures.
Throughout the film, Ong interweaves van der Staay’s monologues and his quotidian rural routines with Thomas Michael Allen and Michael(a) Daoud’s burlesque renditions of scenes and songs from Purcell’s opera. In one nocturnal scene, the villa’s classically built veranda is transformed into a garishly lit space described as a “bondage altar” in the closing credits. In another, Allen’s dying character (who is supposed to be the spurned Dido, but named simply as “The Unloved One” in the credits) croons a torch song in Daoud’s arms, in a posture resembling the Pièta.
The House of Janus may be baffling at times, but the artifice – or should we say edifice? – is unquestionably beautiful. In the quieter moments of the film – the close-ups of flora and fauna in the garden, or the tracking shots through those Umbrian country roads – Camille Lacadee’s camerawork provides moving visual counterpoints to van der Staay’s voiceovers about the history of the land he considers his home away from home, and the fortunes of neighbours he now considers more like close family.
Gabor Csongradi’s dazzling soundscapes adds a welcoming frisson and mystique to the most tranquil of scenes, as conversations are suddenly obscured by crescendos of electronic interference. Such interventions provide the moments which really live up to the film’s title, as they elevates Ong’s film into the sublime, a creature staring at once back at the past and forward into a fuzzy future.
Director: Keng Sen Ong
Screenwriters: Adriaan van der Staay, Keng Sen Ong
With: Thomas Michael Allen, Michael(a) Daoud, Keng Sen Ong, Adriaan van der Staay
Producer: Traslin Ong
Cinematography, editing: Camille Lacadee
Music, sound designer: Gabor Csongradi
Production company: T:>Works Singapore
Venue: Singapore International Film Festival (Undercurrent)
In Dutch, English
80 minutes
