Dutch Film Festival 2024 Review: LIKE TEARS IN RAIN, The Many Adventures Of Rutger Hauer

The documentary Like Tears in Rain by the late Rutger Hauer's goddaughter Sanna Fabery de Jonge recently played at the Nederlands Film Festival (NFF). The film paints an intimate picture of the actor. Hauer, who was born in 1944 in the Dutch town of Breukelen, died in Beetsterswaag, Friesland, the province where his acting career began. Fabery de Jonge knew Rutger Hauer and his wife Ineke all her life. 'They were and still are my parents' very best friends' she emphasizes with affection, 'they were always there.'

The idea to make a film about the actor arose after Rutger's death at a commemoration six months later. Sanna Fabery de Jonge always knew that he was a special man, but there she heard from the people around her and from various speakers what Rutger had meant to them. That's where she got the idea to do something with it. 'Most people don't know these different sides of Rutger and maybe we can lift a corner of the veil in a film about him, about how he stood in life.' She knew that the film had to start with her and her personal bond with Hauer as her godfather, friend. 'How I saw him is clearly visible onthe Super 8 films: very sweet, humorous, adventurous and traveling the world with his great love Ineke.'

Her close bond with the actor gave Fabery de Jonge easy access to his abundant private film material. Hauer used film and video throughout his life to take snapshots and record events, often on set. Her family - bond gave her also easy access to his often famous friends and colleagues from the international film world such as RobertRodriguez, Whoopy Goldberg andMickey Rourke. People who saw him for the person who he was. In a way they are, according to Fabery de Jonge, people like him. Famous and also 'idiosyncratic talents, people who do not participate in Hollywood as standard, who keep their private lives to themselves, who make unique films, who go in search of adventure,' she explains. And their stories are certainly a fascinating addition to the story of Hauer as an actor and as a person.

The picture of the man is rich but still Sanna Fabery de Jonge left out al lot because it no longer fitted into the story during editing. Things like Sea Shepherd and his own
Starfish foundation or the story of the tattoo with his fingerprint on it were left because they disrupted the storyline and rhythm of the film. It makes up for the fine portrayal of a talented, poetically minded man, an actor who was constantly looking for silence in between his many adventurous ventures around the world. Silence he could find everywhere but above all in his beloved home with wife and friends in the Dutch region of Friesland.

As in the title quote "Like tears in the rain" where the powers from within and those from above mix, Hauer was a man and actor with many faces. Adventurous and private. Those two sides were also a guiding principle for the documentary film Fabery de Jonge made. “Rutger was a gentle giant,” said Ridley Scott, the director of Blade Runner, in a statement about the actor shortly after he passed away in 2019. 'I think every film is fiction', Rutger Hauer himself said in an interview seven years earlier in Milan. By that he meant that every film looks at the story and the world through the eyes of its creator. And Hauer, as the documentary shows, added his own vision to his long career. He wrote the following piece for his dialogue in Blade Runner himself: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."

With thanks to Sanna Fabery de Jonge,  the director of Like Tears in Rain who was in busy times so kind to answer my questions and to the Dutch Film Festival where I had to honour to be one of the jurors for the press prize of the Festival.