May 6th
Koch Lorber, $24.98
First, the history lesson: Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, great-grandnephew of the painter, was murdered – or "assassinated" or "butchered" depending on what news report you're reading – on Nov. 2, 2004, while riding his bicycle to work on postproduction aspects of May 6th. His killer, a Dutch Moroccan by the name of Mohammed Bouyeri, shot Van Gogh off his bike, wounding him, and then calmly finished the execution with another bullet before slitting the filmmaker's throat and stabbing the knife through his heart, all in seconds, all in the broad daylight of an otherwise normal morning rush hour in the Hague. Bouyeri's motives were anything but shadowy: Pinned between hilt and heart was a note decrying not Van Gogh but his partner on the short narrative film "Submission," which took on radical Islam's treatment of women and which had been aired on Dutch television. The partner and former member of Dutch Parliament, Somalia-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has since gone into hiding, but Van Gogh's body of work – politically charged, professionally and artfully directed, frequently spellbinding, never less than intellectually driven – still speaks truth to terror and offers if not hope, then something similarly daring. May 6th is an unnervingly fitting epitaph for the bearish, chain-smoking, always-controversial Van Gogh, a politico/libertine of the old school who was fueled by his passionate belief in the power of free speech and even freer art. May 6th is Blow-Up for the new world disorder, a taut paranoid thriller about the 2002 assassination of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn. Fortuyn, an openly gay Libertarian firebrand who polarized the Netherlands, was, like Van Gogh, loved and loathed in equal measure. Van Gogh's improbably probable final feature – he would be assassinated 911 days after Fortuyn – rockets along on the bloody rails of the here and now, a fictional film that appears to be growing less so every moment. It's crisply acted (Thijs Römer, as a fashion photographer who accidentally snaps incriminating shots of Fortuyn's final moments, is amazing) and scored and edited for both maximum suspense and major controversy. It's a great achievement.
