A lot of Europeans sought out new ground abroad in the aftermath of World War II; for the Dutch, the search for land was literal. The country, much of it below sea level, faced severe floods and a chronic housing shortage in the 1950s. People who needed to rebuild their lives couldn’t even find the space to build a home. More like pioneers than jetsetters, the characters in Ben Sambogaart’s Bride Flight go halfway around the world to find the space to reassemble themselves, boarding a much-publicized 1953 KLM (Dutch Airways) transcontinental flight to New Zealand on a small, shaky propeller plane.
The film opens in the present day as an aged Frank (Rutger Hauer) tends his vast vineyard and wine-tasting complex in the New Zealand hills. One passenger, at least, found more than enough land. But this vintage is his last; Frank crashes his jeep, climbs out, and clutches his chest. Bride Flight begins to shuffle between old Frank’s group of old friends, as they travel for his funeral service, and the journey that brought them all to New Zealand half a century earlier.
The focal point is a sweeping, troubled romance that begins on the flight between the young bachelor Frank (Waldemar Torenstra) and the shy Ana (Karina Smulders), who, like many of the women on board, is meeting her fiancé in New Zealand to start a new life. They meet friends Ester (Anna Drijver), a fashion designer, and Marjorie (Elise Schaap) onboard, and the four of them drift together and apart and back through marriage, affairs, children (including ones of complex lineage), and careers. It’s a lot of material in two hours, and Sambogaart packages it efficiently, with equal concern for his characters and his audience’s interests.
The flight that brings them all to New Zealand is filled with turbulence, and the film, too, gets off to a messy start, with weird pacing, jumpy transitions between characters’ past and present selves, and not-very-believable special effects of the plane tumbling through rainy skies. One tender moment on the plane, an exchange of romantic glances between Ada and Frank, is interrupted by his nose, which whistles with his every breath. It’s giggle-worthy at first, but it keeps whistling through the following conversation, which is a serious one. Somewhere along the way, I began to admire Sombogaart’s decision, if there was one, to leave it in.
It’s a good example of Bride Flight’s unpolished style and the way it disarms with goofiness to make its sappiness more sticky. Sombogaart’s not aiming for, say, Dutch mumblecore (which, I think, would be impossible given the Dutch language’s incredibly energetic enunciation) or vérité, but the film’s hiccups often act as a foil against the glossy conventions of the epic historical romance. The film’s structure might be airbrushed, but its characters aren’t. That Frank and Ada are too distracted by their own smoldering to care made me think, maybe, they mean it.
I ended up caring about the characters, but what happens in the background kept me just as interested. Most audiences, at least, don’t study the 20th century through a Dutch exilic perspective. Ester’s a Dutch Jew whose family died in the Holocaust. Frank’s a former Japanese POW whose family lived in Indonesia, a Dutch colony until it was occupied by the Japanese during the war. Ada marries an oppressive religious fanatic who thinks female desire is gross. It’s surprisingly jarring to be reminded that the Netherlands wasn’t always atheistic and sex-positive or that they used to be a colonial power (and still, in some ways, are). And it’s welcome to be reminded that immigrants had more islands in mind than Ellis.