Tricked | Review

Community Cinema: Verhoeven’s Failed Experiment Confirms Concepts of Authorship

Four years after its premiere in his native Netherlands and a screening at the 2012 Rome Film Festival, Paul Verhoeven’s experimental title Tricked makes its way to US theaters, available simultaneously streaming exclusively on Fandor. The director playfully refers to the film as 14 ½, referring to Fellini, since ultimately the ambitious endeavor, wherein audience participation was called upon to craft the narrative based on a four page scenario, isn’t quite feature length. Instead, the film includes a behind-the-scenes preface (called Paul’s Experience) documenting the significant pre-production travails, including thousands of scripts sent, none of which were actually used in completion. As such, the project has a rather uneven, cobbled together feel, and seems to prove the concept of the auteur.

Ineke (Ricky Koole) is hosting a birthday bash for her philandering husband Remco (Peter Blok), who has just turned fifty. Their daughter Lieke (Carolien Spoor) excitedly invites bestie Merel (Gaite Jansen) up to her bedroom for a little cocaine fueled pre-partying as guests arrives. Breaking into her brother’s (Robert de Hoog) bedroom, they discover he has a lusty fascination with Merel, though it seems she’s already entered an illicit affair to Remco, though no one knows it yet. Meanwhile, Remco’s very pregnant ex-mistress Nadja (Salie Harmsen) shows up to congratulate the aging real estate developer, which rather dampens the mood. Following the party, Remco finds himself being blackmailed into selling his shares of the company in a plan devised by Nadja and his business partner.

Ironically, the kind of control Verhoeven grew tired of dealing with in the US studio system rears its head in another guise during the construction of Tricked as he becomes a slave to the uncontained imaginations of innumerable authors (upwards of 370 reported). Thus, the behind-the-scenes travails are ultimately more interesting than the final product. But Verhoeven indicates his desire for a creative challenge motivating this project, even though it wasn’t an altogether fruitful one, and Tricked plays like a meager pit stop between the decade long stretch from 2006’s Black Book to 2016’s forthcoming Elle, wherein he tackles his first French language endeavor.

Performances are routinely polished, with Ricky Koole as Remco’s icy, bitter wife as the stand out in a cavalcade of melodramatic twists. Entertaining in a kind of tawdry, day-time t.v. soap opera sense, Tricked never feels as transgressive as we’d expect from Verhoeven, even though it features requisite provocations like coke-sniffing teens, rampant adultery, and a bloody tampon which becomes the ultimate dramatic catalyst. Most of the narrative depends on significant reveals between the principal characters, nearly all of these revolving around who Remco has slept with at one point or another. Eventually, this becomes a tired trick, even as it ends with a beautifully violent confrontation.

But nothing about Tricked feels cinematic, including its brightly lit, glossy interiors, which makes this feel like a savvy pilot for an impending series. One wonders what glorious sleaze this could have been had it been completely devised from Verhoeven’s id, like a tricked out version of something like Vinterberg’s The Celebration (1998).

★★½/☆☆☆☆☆