It's only in its final moments that Harry Kumel’s The Arrival of Joachim Stiller resembles
an explicit parallel of Christianity, and it’s a measure of the film’s scope
that this represents one of the more modest potential destinations. The film’s
protagonist, Freek Groenevelt, starts to observe strange events, many of them
linked in some way by that name “Joachim Stiller” – the unseen Stiller starts
to assert himself as an explicit presence in the life of Freek and others, for
example in letters arriving correctly addressed despite having been mailed
decades earlier. Over the course of its two and a half hours, the film
sometimes seems to be building the kind of myth that in contemporary Hollywood
hands would yield a portal to hell surrounded by swirling CGI demons; at other
times though “Stiller” seems more like an abstract expression of all that’s
unresolved in our personal or collective pasts, or else like mere
mischief-making, some kind of local in-joke. The film’s closely-observed Antwerp
setting is certainly a major part of its appeal – we spend so much time
observing the city’s trams and streets and cathedral that you wonder if Stiller
doesn’t work for the local tourist bureau. But equally as important are the
copious narrative strands and throwaway scenes that in terms of their strict contribution
to the resolution seem to be neither here nor there, in particular a bawdy extended
subplot about a near-feral local graffiti artist and the unprincipled
entrepreneur who sets out to profit from his work: as in the Hitchcockian opposition
between suspense and surprise, you get the sense that the film’s scheme depends
as much on what doesn’t happen, or on what can’t be rationalized or justified,
as on what does and can. For all its considerable eccentricity then, the film stands as
a more intriguing and rewarding exploration of personal and spiritual striving
than a more devout or linear work would likely be.
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