Cinema: DE GROETEN VAN MIKE! (Mike Says Goodbye!)
Further info on EYE
Title: De Groeten Van Mike!
(Mike Says Goodbye!)
Director: Maria Peters
Country: Netherlands
Language: Dutch
On a KLM flight back to Tokyo last March, I watched this Dutch film, Mike Says Goodbye! This is probably something that I will not have easy access to in Asia.
The story succeeded in tickling the soft part of my heart, which had been battered and benumbed by academic training.
It is a feel-good family movie telling a story which evolves around the central character, Mike, and his friends in the section of paediatrics in a hospital.
From a critical viewpoint, the plot is not special, ordinary, I would say. However, the story itself feels real and moving right because of its simplicity.
What really got me in the film is a poem written by a supporting character, Mike's roommate in the hospital. That little boy is paralysed in the lower part of his body after a devastating car accident. He can no longer dream the dream of becoming a pilot. Everyone is anxious for him as he has refused rehabilitation and resisted any psychological consoling.
He writes and rewrites a poem, which he probably has no intention to make public at all. Or, the revision process is a way to get ready for the new life from which he cannot escape.
It is a poem about the last ordinary day of a school boy, and the sudden change in everything ordinary when a truck hits him and overturns all those simple facts of life.
The poem is heart-wrenching for its wish for simplicity, its humility, and the impossibility to return to the ordinary.
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