The End of Tom Six
This answers the question ‘what happened to Tom Six after The Human Centipede?’ the way Simon Callow’s biographies answer the question ‘what happened to Orson Welles after Citizen Kane?’ Welles might be a stretch as a comparison, but I’m reminded of his statement that falling in love with making films doomed him to be an outsider, a financial disaster area and a life of increasing frustration as all the praise and critical declarations of genius in the world didn’t mean funding for or wide release of the works he’d poured himself into.
The film runs through Six’s career – three Dutch films I’ve not seen, the three Human Centipedes which I think make for one of the cinema’s few genuine tryptych/trilogies – and then gets to two big subjects … the failure of every distributor in the world to release The Onania Club, a conceptually outrageous but coolly effective satire, and Six’s confinement to his Amsterdam apartment by multiple sclerosis. Made in black and white (like The Onania Club) to evoke the 1940s-50s films noirs which are (along with hand-rolled cigars) among the few pleasures he’s able to indulge in his current circumstances, The End of Tom Six is a self-declared final work. By coincidence, I watched it on the same day I saw Dead Souls, which Alex Cox has said will be his last film – and I’d not be surprised if either creative came back for an encore … Six adds to the finality by burning the scripts of film projects he’s unlikely to be able to make, as much from industry apathy/hostility as his physically limiting condition.
The strongest moments of The End of Tom Six are the simplest – Six propped up in what seems like a pose on a ‘Chinese opium couch’ (with a joke about cultural appropriation) only to admit that this is the only posture which even slightly alleviates his discomfort and talking about the physical pain of his escalating condition and the spiritual pain of having a film he believes to be his best work (I’d agree with him) in limbo. Six interrupts himself by playing another Tom Six, the director of this ramshackle production – dawrf Edwin Alofs plays a one-eyed cameraman and a hearing-challenged sound guy while a tattooed guy known as the awful warning image on cigarette packets (Demian Kurosa) gurns to the camera and there are repeated interruptions by a literal ‘censor Nazi’ (Servaes Nelissen) who runs jokes about trigger warnings and wokeness into the ground (just now, I’m more worried about Nazi Nazis than tone-policing). Maartje Willems sips cocktails and smokes like a noir femme fatale but is a constantly warm presnce, and there’s funny stuff about the five-year-old (Olivier Julius Willems) dragooned into editing the picture.
As one of the few people who’s seen The Onania Club – which is perhaps the most visited review on this site – I’m in an unusual position vis a vis The End of Tom Six in that I know he’s right about the movie (he namechecks me and my listing of the film in a Sight & Sound end-of-year top ten) and share his frustrated puzzlement that it’s not come out anywhere, especially since blather like ‘the market has changed’ and ‘our schedule is full’ don’t come close to explaining why this of all films gets stuck on a shelf when any given festival will turn up dozens of lesser works that have landed distribution deals. Though not long, The End of Tom Six is repetitive and hectoring at times – but Six has always been a witty writer and many of his offhand lines and zingers will stick with you. It’s an honest film about a debilitating condition and has moments of grace and humour – Tom’s daily, agonising trips outside his apartment just to have a coffee (decaf, which he says is like ‘a hooker who only cuddles’) in a café by a canal are a reminder that small pleasures are worth fighting for as much as the big battles of art and commerce.
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