The flood of Dutch romcoms just doesn't dry out, and I stopped trying to keep up. Every now and then I attempt one, to see if someone actually bothered to try something new, or had a sudden inspiration to do something more in the British style, like 'Last Christmas'. But no: always the same basic plot about a single lady not realizing that Mr Right is that cute guy working/living/working out next to her, over and over again.
When I heard that 'Taal is zeg maar echt mijn ding ("Language is, like, really my thing") would be adapted into a movie, I had a sparkle of hope that we would get a Dutch 'Adaptation'. Movie buffs probably know that Adaptation starring Nicolas Cage was famously based on a book called 'The Orchid Thief', which doesn't have a plot that would easily lend itself to a movie. But it was a bestseller, so Hollywood wanted an adaptation anyway. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman got the job, and got such a bad case of writer's block that he finally wrote a story about himself trying to adapt an unfilmable book. The rest is history: the movie is a great satire on Hollywood moviemaking, and a stand-out example of creative writing.
'Taal is zeg maar echt mijn ding' is a book full of funny observations on contemporary use of the Dutch language, especially how we say one thing and mean the other. Or how we keep polluting the language because we use it incorrectly. So this sounds like a perfect opportunity for someone to get creative. But abandon all hope, because the screenwriters unfortunately didn't get their Charlie Kaufman moment. The only small traces of the book are in the main character Anne, a self-declared linguist who sometimes comments on how she hears others use their vocabulary. But this occurs very sparingly and briefly, is rarely funny, and amounts to very little, if anything, in the story. You should think that an adaptation of a book about modern language would be a good basis for some witty dialogues at the very least. Think again.
The plot (which isn't from the book) is a standard romcom template as described above, clearly meant as a scaffold around the meager language stuff, supplemented with tropes like the clumsy protagonist, the badboy love interest, the annoying family (including gay brother), and sex while wearing underwear (that last one keeps annoying the hell out of me, having grown up in the 80s when no Dutch film was complete without some nudity). Most of that 'original content' is uninteresting and often downright annoying. The only part that gives the story a tiny amount of dramatic weight is the subplot where Anne deals with her father who starts to suffer from dementia.
Maybe some people can identify with Anne and her search for the right man as she struggles with how other people talk. For the rest: skip this and watch Adaptation. Or Fleabag, which I hear is great.
