A Man and a Camera review – doorstep prank movie is pass-agg psychological study

Dutch film-maker Guido Hendrikx has given us a funny but also somewhat slippery and disingenuous bit of pass-agg provocation, somewhere between documentary cinema and conceptual art. For just over an hour, we get his point-of-view as he troops about a bland Dutch suburb, ringing on people’s doorbells and just mutely filming them when they appear. We never see the cameraman himself.

Some people are baffled, some bemused, some alarmed. Most, having waited in vain for to him to explain himself, are unwilling to be the first to make an aggressive or disapproving move, and certainly unwilling to be filmed doing so, so they are trapped into a kind of smiley stare-out contest. Some are very annoyed; one threatens to trash his camera and another appears to carry out the threat. The cops are called, but they don’t seem too bothered and then go away after which the cameraman resumes his house-to-house calls; well, that’s how it looks in the edit. And throughout, Hendrikx never says anything, and we see how people will politely say and do almost anything to fill the excruciating silence: therapists and cops use the same technique.

Everybody looks mystified, but at some level, of course, they all understand what’s going on: they are being pranked, in the style of Euro-arthouse vivisectionists Lars von Trier or Michael Haneke. Their bourgeois stuffiness is being subject to deadpan scrutiny. (Hilariously, one man who actually invited Hendrikx into his house, tries to hide a Hitler biography he had been reading.) It is extraordinary how many people, having invited him like a vampire over the threshold, allow him to hang around and they even get used to him.

So far, so amusing. But wait. We all know that people who haven’t given permission to be filmed have their faces blanked out in documentaries. It hasn’t happened here and in the closing credits we get a roll-call of all their names; evidently, all these householders were subsequently approached in the very normal way and asked to sign legal waivers; those who did not agree didn’t make the cut and those who did … well, you are entitled to wonder if they were given a fee. So you sense that this spectacle of exposure is some sense contrived, though it’s amusing enough.

• A Man and a Camera is on True Story from 27 December.