_{If Yes, Okay by Dick Verdult}

In the black comedy If Yes, Okay, little is considered sacred, any outcome is possible and nothing is as it seems.

Life in the household of teenager Amy is somewhat rarefied. She is the spoiled daughter of a billionaire magnate and an opera-singer mother, and she is both bored and frustrated. The atmosphere within her luscious family pad is little other than stultifyingly claustrophobic.

Luckily, she also has a keen imagination and a desire to create art out of her circumstances. What’s more, she has as much cash as she needs to make manifest her creative impulses, all of which derive from her immediate and constricted home life, and a disdain for parents she would as happily see dead. As we are told at the beginning of the film, the smaller the cage, the better the singing.

So Amy enlists the services of a director and a troupe of performers to recreate, in Kabuki style, the strange ongoings within the household, a process which, satisfyingly and with great panache, ends in death and tragedy. In a coda sequence we encounter a faraway land, a place where there is no claustrophobia and where happiness is defined by the elements, clean air, mud, water… and laughter.

Director Dick Verdult (aka Dick El Demasiado) is a big noise in Latin America for his electronic revival and distortion of Latin American cumbia music (some of which we hear in the film). Also a successful novelist, his first idea was to write about the children of drug lords. These kids cannot be blamed for the sins of their fathers, but their sometimes “capricious natures” are shaped by their upbringing in lavish and dangerous surroundings. These kids have the capability, he reckons, to be “future ministers, presidents and bank directors.”

Verdult decided on a film and further reckoned that it would be interesting to tell this story within The Netherlands. “They also have millionaires but it's much more Protestant. The Dutch don't like to be very explicit about their wealth. They don't want to drive in yellow Rolls Royces. So I introduced it into a sober culture where I could still be just as baroque.”

Within the tight confines of the family domicile the Dutch Amy is equally capricious, cruel and whimsical. As she ekes out her life in, as Verdult puts it, “this egotistical Wall of Mirrors,” the play that she creates is a logical consequence not only of the excessive freedom she is accorded but also the neglect that she feels.

“She has created a little Frankenstein monster that takes over this Kabuki theater, a monster that suddenly stands up and has this role to play in the film. I like that idea of this kind of cannibalism, of something that you generate and then it takes over,” says Verdult, underlining how the whole process is also driven by Amy’s “very strong sense of observation.”

“And she's very nasty with it,” he adds of the girl's story that hurtles towards its grand guignol finale. “She's got a very venomous pen.”

Verdult continuously seeks to confound viewer expectations and to eschew any notion of cliché in his work. This is evident even in the presentation of characters and their foibles. The Vietnamese chauffeur who extols the virtues of his homeland is so obviously Dutch, and the very male assassin sent to eliminate the film’s adulterous doctor all of a sudden addresses his intended target in the guise of a lovelorn woman named Angelique. And when it comes to discussing her father’s businesses, Amy can articulate his ethical misgivings far better than he can, and very much in the language of high finance.

“I was always really against clichés,” Verdult emphasises of his craft. “I think the cliché is a construction to which we have adapted and which we have embraced to tell stories, but it's an element that generates profound lies in society.”

If Yes, Okay is produced by De Productie. It is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund and Brabant C. International sales are handled by Reel Suspects.

For a full overview of all Dutch films screening at IFFR 2023, click here.
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