_{Frantic Attempts by Joris Tobé}

It’s barely a year since Tobé left film school in Utrecht. Frantic Attempts is his graduation project, a tragicomic story that follows the hapless young Matthias who has just discovered his girlfriend is pregnant. She has paid for him to attend an expensive weekend therapy course in the countryside which might help him face up to his responsibilities as an adult - something he has been trying very hard to shirk. He’s not keen to be there and the weekend threatens to go haywire after the woman therapist in charge vanishes.

“It was inspired by my own experiences in a coaching year,” Tobé acknowledges the autobiographical roots of the film. He was 18 at the time, trying to work out what to do with his life, but his therapists didn’t help much.

The director believes that young adults of his generation questioning the shallowness of their materialistic lives often end up on coaching weekends. They delude themselves that they can buy happiness by having few days of therapy. The sense of shallowness that capitalist society engenders in the first place is replicated in the solution that people in his generation seek to overcome it, he observes, even though he understands the growth of, and need for, such coaches and coaching weekends. “It feels like the same dynamics. We try to buy off our suffering. We think we can fix it by buying and working really hard, as capitalist society implies. I saw the absurdity of it all and came to the conclusion that that is not how life works, and I found it a really interesting subject for a movie.”

Tobé recruited comedy actor Robbert Bleij to play Matthias after working alongside him on another production. “I saw in him this touching personality which is kind of melancholic,” he explains the choice of leading man. He knew that Bleij could bring both humour and pathos to the role.

The best-known figure in the film is Wimie Wilhelm who plays the very flighty therapist. She has appeared in many Dutch movies ranging from Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book to Marleen Gorris’ Antonia’s Line. “I knew her daughter… I told her ‘I want to cast your mum, but I don’t know how to ask her,’” Tobé remembers. In the end, the daughter asked on the director’s behalf and her mother quickly agreed to take the role. “She had more experience than the whole crew all together,” he notes of the veteran Dutch star.

Bits of Tobé can be found in the other protagonists too. “Whenever I write a character, there is a small side of me in them,” he agrees. However, most of the other actors are newcomers who 'had never really seen a film set before' and were fresh out of drama school.

Cast and crew shot the movie on location in a house in a forest near Rhenen. They had five shooting days in the early summer of 2022.

“I really like to shoot in one location because I feel that gives a lot of room for the actors to feel rooted,” Tobé states. He found his producers Brenda Narvaez and Yoeri van Esseveld [“a great team”] in an unusual way. “I just asked a lot of people, ‘can you help me produce this film? I can’t pay anyone but I promise it is going to be a great project.’”

The director had a brief moment of doubt after he watched the first assembly. “I thought ‘oh no! Is this what I had in mind?’ It was far too long and I was discouraged a little bit.” However, his tutors at the film school told him to keep editing and not to lose heart. He did so, and the film eventually “got better and better and better.”

The Karlovy Vary screening is the latest staging post for a film which has already been winning plenty of plaudits. Frantic Attempts picked up Dutch Film Critics Award for Best Film at the Netherlands Film Festival in Utrecht last September. It went on to screen at IFF Tegenstroom in Ghent, Belgium.

Tobé is currently writing for a TV series, preparing a new short and beginning to think about his feature debut. “The film [Frantic Attempts] opened up a lot of possibilities for me. At first, I was just a guy from film school I but now I have proved I can make a film. A lot of people liked that and it opened up a lot of doors. I am trying to keep up in this weird business but I am not dissatisfied with my first year since graduating,” he says with evident understatement of his rapid rise.
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