Paul Verhoeven’s Tricked

Studio: Kino Lorber
Directed by Paul Verhoeven

Feb 29, 2016 By Julia Bembenek Web Exclusive

Paul Verhoeven’s Tricked is a half-documentary, half-narrative film operating off of an interesting “what-if.” The reknowned (and occasionally reviled) director pulls together a team of professionals to write, cast, and produce the first four minutes of a feature film. It’s elegantly constructed - a pretty young woman named Nadja shows up, very apparently pregnant, at the birthday party of her former lover Remco, the head of a large corporation and strained family man. Contributing to the instantly stressful circumstances are a cast of characters including Remco’s harried wife, aimless 20-something children and their sexy friend, and his business associates. With this curious assemblage the scene is set and Verhoeven’s next move is to hand over control… to the audience.

Verhoeven seems earnest enough, claiming his aim with Tricked is to tap into the creative originality that can come from those outside of the system. As a benchmark for this concept, Verhoeven refers to his early films, where his ignorance of classic filmmaking technique were compensated for with his inventive technical expertise from his background as a mathematician. There’s also of course some vague discussions of the power of social media and the creative possibilities of crowdsourcing to lend a modern edge. As Verhoeven and his crew toil through crafting mountains of user submissions into a cohesive narrative unit, it’s clear that they’re all very committed to the exercise.

The results of the experiment don’t quite make all the tedium of construction worthwhile. From the narrative perspective, Tricked is a film without a strong directorial voice, the characters playing through scenarios that seem more like a jigsaw puzzle than a story. The documentary perspective doesn’t fare much better, lacking the strong emotional interactions that other filmmaking-process-driven films - like Lars Von Trier’s The Five Obstructions or Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams - use to achieve greater statements on creative vision. Tricked is basically a party game, an exquisite corpse made by a crowd of people playing at being artistic but with no actual investment in the outcome. The pieces fit together, but the impact is fleeting at best.

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