看过了电影,特别是那么多温情的影评。我急迫的想要知道,军官最后的结局。在网上找到了英文版本的原著,for a lost soldier,顿时所有关于这部电影的美好,荡然无存。
这是我引用的书评,和我的看法基本相同,男孩是被rape了,至少是molested,而军官,则是暴力和冷漠,绝不是电影中的美好。
Jeroen is 12 and a long way from home. Because of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, Jeroen’s mother has sent him to a remote area of the country to await liberation. Alone, frightened, and feeling less than welcome by his hosts, Jeroen explores the countryside, and after a while begins to make friends. Jan, his hosts’ older son, stirs emotions in Jeroen that he is unable to explain. He enjoys watching the older boy swim and play, but becomes frightened when Jan wants to show him how he has matured lately.
Just as Jeroen is starting to fit-in, a most remarkable event occurs. Allied forces roll into town and the Germans are on the run. Everyone, including Jeroen, is fascinated by the soldiers and crowd around to get a better look. One of the soldiers, however, has his eye on Jeroen. Walt attempts to develop a friendship with young Jeroen, but the boy is very frightened. Through a series of encounters, the two become tentative friends. Each time they meet, Walt takes their relationship a little further, until finally on one such meeting, he has sex with Jeroen. Jeroen, a little squeamish to begin with, is terrified.
Eventually, the relationship becomes a full-fledged affair, with Walt and Jeroen meeting frequently for sex. Each of the encounters, though, is physically and emotionally painful for Jeroen. Walt is abusive in his treatment of the young boy. Nevertheless, Jeroen becomes infatuated with the soldier and is shocked one morning to find that the army has pulled-out of the little town and disappeared. Emotionally devastated, Jeroen can not understand why Walt left without saying anything. His only proof of the relationship is emotional and physical scares, and a small photograph of the young soldier.
Upon returning to Amsterdam, Jeroen searches in vain for Walt, but with no success. Once there, he begins the process of healing but he never forgets Walt. A
This is a autobiography of Rudi Van Dantzig’s early life. Rudi was a dancer in Europe and became quite popular. He looks back at this part of his life partly with a longing and partly with relief.
My Notes
Clearly this book is not for everyone. Young Jeroen is such a moving character that reading the story, and understanding his emotional state at the time, becomes draining. Of course, Jeroen was sexually molested, but he looks back at the events, not with hatred or spite, but with tenderness. I found it easy to understand his motivations, emotions, and actions during those years, but I find it difficult to understand his treatment of these events now, as an adult.
If you have seen the film, you will be shocked at the character of Walt in the book. In the film, the relationship is touching and moving despite the eight or nine years age difference. There is a loving relationship nevertheless. In the book, Walt is clearly a predator and Jeroen is his victim. I highly recommend reading this book, but I warn you it will get to you and you will want to reach through the pages and strangle Walt.
(http://www.oocities.org/soho/den/8979/vandantzig_rudi.html)
看书吧,会有个不同的视角。
再给大家发个原著作者,也就是小男孩原型的背景故事吧,我想说,他过得应该很幸福。现实生活中,他事业有成,是荷兰最著名、也是贡献卓著的编舞家。他也真的是同志,有着一个life partner,也是志同道合舞蹈界人士。现在原型人物的小男孩,已经在2012年过世,我很庆幸,他,真正存在过,活过。
Rudi van Dantzig
Rudi van Dantzig, the choreographer, who has died aged 78, was a pivotal figure in the rise to world renown of Dutch ballet in the past half century.
Van Dantzig described himself as “a sort of bastard between classical ballet and modern”, and his works could be more interesting for their intentions than their results. However, his boldness in evoking the anguished isolation of a homosexual boy in a ballet in 1965 won him a global profile and the key support of Rudolf Nureyev. This led to commissions from the Royal Ballet and other leading international companies.
His work captured the mood of the 1960s and became a template for modern ballet that offered a powerful European alternative to the abstract modernists of New York dance. Today, the assumption that the Dutch led mainland Europe in ballet and dance is largely due to van Dantzig.
Rudi van Dantzig was born in Amsterdam on August 4 1933 . It was not until he saw The Red Shoes on its release in 1948 that he knew his vocation (he later claimed to have watched the film nearly 50 times). He started dance lessons at 16, and approached Sonia Gaskell, a Lithuanian-Dutch dancer who was working to generate a Dutch ballet tradition by establishing professional companies and schools.
In 1952, because she was short of boys, she took the raw 18-year old into Ballet Recital, a company from which she would establish the Dutch National Ballet within a decade. With Gaskell’s encouragement, in 1955 van Dantzig choreographed the first of his 51 ballets, Night Island, using music by Debussy .
As a homosexual with an active political sensibility (both his parents were dedicated socialists), he felt acutely the intolerance of the times, and this became a major theme in his ballets and writings.(作为一名拥有政治敏感性的同志(他的妇女都是坚定的社会主义者),他认识到这个时代的狭隘和缺乏宽容,这成为他编舞和写作的主题之一。)
In 1965 he made his breakthrough with Monument for a Dead Boy, showing an adolescent destroyed by his unacceptable sexuality. It was inspired by the brief life of the influential Dutch homosexual poet Hans Lodeizen. The work, set to experimental electronic music by Jan Boerman, was so powerful that Nureyev asked to perform it with Dutch National Ballet.
Nureyev, who was then feeling underappreciated at the Royal Ballet, was searching to cross over into a modern idiom, but he had considerable difficulty understanding van Dantzig’s modern movement and convoluted narrative. At the same time, he found the choreographer’s blunt amiability refreshing compared with the sycophancy which he usually encountered, and he mastered the idiom sufficiently to impress the Dutch.
The Royal Ballet’s director, the classical choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton, then commissioned van Dantzig to create The Ropes of Time for Nureyev and Monica Mason (the Royal Ballet’s present director). The piece had Nureyev as an existential traveller writhing in pas de deux with Death and Life (Mason and Diana Vere). Originally the Life figure was intended to be the Royal Ballet’s star ballerina Antoinette Sibley, but she fell into depression as she tried to master the different plastique and withdrew.
Though the work received ovations from Nureyev’s adoring public on its premiere in 1970, it was found too self-consciously tortured by critics ; and on the company’s subsequent tour to the United States it was panned. Van Dantzig himself was unhappy with Nureyev’s attempts at his choreographic style, saying: “It is like somebody who speaks a different language and you can always hear the mother tongue underneath.” But he still made two further ballets for Nureyev in the late 1970s, Blown in a Gentle Wind and About a Dark House — the second a psychosexual melodrama in which Nureyev intruded unwisely upon a dinner party and was stripped by the guests.
In 1969 van Dantzig had succeeded Gaskell as artistic director of the Dutch National Ballet, first as co-director, then, from 1971, as sole director. For the next 20 years he refined the large and somewhat chaotic mission of the DNB by focusing on 20th-century classicists, primarily George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton, and also on new contemporary ballets created by himself, Hans van Manen and Toer van Schayk .
This trio made The Netherlands a new powerhouse of modern ballet choreography to the European taste, but there was no great enthusiasm for it in Britain. Attempts to open British eyes to the much-talked-about Dutch dawn by both Ashton and his successor, Kenneth MacMillan, fell flat, largely because the British preferred MacMillan and Ashton.
For many of his ballets, van Dantzig collaborated with van Schayk, an outstanding dancer and competent designer, who was also his partner.(很多的芭蕾舞作品,他都是和van Schayk合作完成的。后者是一名杰出的舞者、设计师,也是前者的生活伴侣) Though he created modern versions of Romeo and Juliet (1967) and Swan Lake (1988), van Dantzig was particularly interested in one-act creations to a wide range of 20th-century composers, among them Richard Strauss for Four Last Songs (1977); Debussy for Night Island (1955); Schoenberg for Gesang der Jünglinge (1977); and Webern for Moments (1988) .
Retiring as director in 1991 after 20 years, van Dantzig continued as the company’s resident choreographer for a further three years, finally bowing out with his 50th creation in 1994 (though he returned to Dutch National Ballet in 2002 to create Lommer). He was succeeded as director at the DNB by the former Royal Ballet star Wayne Eagling, now English National Ballet’s director.
An accomplished writer, van Dantzig was acclaimed for his debut novel To a Lost Soldier (1986), which dealt with his awakening to his homosexuality as a child evacuated in the war, and a sexual relationship with a passing soldier. In 1993 it was made into a film in Holland, and it was translated into English in 1996. He also wrote books about Nureyev (Remembering Nureyev: the Trail of a Comet), and the homosexual Dutch artist and anti-Nazi resistance fighter Willem Arondéus.
Rudi van Dantzig, born August 4 1933, died January 19 2012