“Modern Love Amsterdam” is well worth watching and provides additional perspective on that most complex but vitally important virtue—love.
For several years now Amazon Prime has made available various series entitled “Modern Love.” Two have that title followed by “Season 1” or “Season 2.” Since “Season Two” appeared, Amazon has made several more series available, but with the first two words followed by their setting, Mumbai, Hyderbad, Tokyo, or Amsterdam. The following review/essay will examine “Modern Love Amsterdam.”
As with “Season Two” each episode (six of them in this series) is around one half hour (39 minutes is the longest). About the second season I wrote that “many of the [eight] episodes did reflect not only that couples today are more racially diverse, but also that they could be of the same sex.” I also noted, however, that the love depicted was restricted to those living in big cities (U.S. or European) and those who are young or middle aged. With one exception, the same two sentences could apply to the Amsterdam episodes.
Also (as with “Season Two”) I like some episodes much better than others. But, as I earlier admitted, “this could be the purely subjective judgement of an octogenarian male, long-married to a good woman.” Except Nancy, that good woman and wife of 58 years (and mother of three adult children) has now left me widowed for a little over a year; and this development, plus her long bout with Alzheimer’s, has led me to especially appreciate two episodes of the Amsterdam series. They are Episode 2: “Hold Me Close,” and Episode 3: “The Big Questions.”
“Hold Me Close” features a couple, Katja and Simon. He’s a journalist, perhaps in his mid-50s; she’s a lawyer, who appears a bit younger. Due to medical malpractice—she argues his case—he has been left partially paralyzed and suffering from aphasia. Due mainly to his condition, they have apparently not had sex—“we haven’t,” he says, for almost three years.” Yet, he tells her, “I love you so much. I don’t want to lose that . . . . If you have needs that I can't fulfil. You can find someone else who . . . .”
As the French film Amour [Love] depicts so beautifully, love in old age, or even middle-age, can be very different than younger love. Marriage vows today are often personalized, but a half-century ago words like these were fairly common: “I promise to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.” Many young couples said such words, but the “sickness and in health “ phrase didn’t usually have much impact. In the latter years of a marriage, however, sickness is often a reality. And how do husband and wife navigate together and continue loving when some ailment makes marriage’s most intimate act of love impossible or close to it? (Such a reality more rarely occurs among younger couples. But in Netflix’s recent Lady Chatterley's Lover a WWI maiming prevents Clifford, Lady Chatterley's husband, from having intercourse with her, and he also suggests that she could have sex with another man.
Although Katija plays squash with a male she works with and sometimes eats out with him, the episode depicts no sex between them, and Simon is fine with their friendship. Toward the end of the film, she comes back from dinner with her male friend, and Katja and Simon go to bed together.
A very tender and loving (but non-sexual) scene follows. As they lie next to each other he asks, “Did you enjoy yourself [at dinner].” She indicates that she did. His face reflects pain, but she moves closer to him, strokes his face, and says, “But I’m here. I’m with you.” And she kisses his cheek and says, “Hold me.” A bit later she adds, “I miss you”; to which he responds, “I miss me too.” The scene ends with their snuggling together and he kissing her forehead. Watching this scene may bring tears to the eyes of many older couples who have experienced a similar love, restricted in its physical dimension.
Episode 3, “The Big Questions,” takes us a chronological step further in the loving process. The wife/mother (Lies) has died about nine months previously after a long illness, leaving behind husband Chris, about in his mid sixties, and three grown sons. There are no flashbacks of her, but apparently Lies was the chief loving center of the family—Chris was apparently less outgoing and effusive. At one point youngest son, Ben, says, she was a “fantastic listener.”
Toward the episode’s end a note from her is read: “My darling men, I so hope you’re all doing well. That you are happy and healthy. That you comfort each other. That you’re there for each other when that isn’t true. I hope that you have all found a way to carry on. That you’re having new adventures and making new friends. And that you don’t feel alone. That’s the most important thing of all. I love you all. I’m always with you. Never forget that. Even when it doesn’t feel like it. I’m there. Always.”
What beautiful words! And how wonderful that Lies wrote them. It raises the question of whether our love can live on after our death. It is certainly possible (whatever our religious beliefs) that the love she expressed in her note will beam upon Chris and their three sons, at least sporadically, for the rest of their lives.
Besides her note, the episode provides more to think about regarding “love and death”—also the title of Woody Allen’s 1975 film. As she hopes, Will they comfort each other? Have they found a way to carry on? Are they making new friends?
The episode addresses these questions, as the four men struggle to cope with her death. The setting is mainly the family home, to which the three sons return to celebrate Christmas. They, especially the two older brothers, Alex and Marius, are critical of their dad, for example for putting the family house up for sale and inviting a woman over for Christmas dinner with them. Son Marius says, “I’m not going to sit here all night and make nice with some bitch I don’t even know.” The woman is Lydia, who Chris says is just a friend who has given him “a lot of support.” Arriving for dinner with Lydia is Jack, her grown son, who later tells Ben, Chris’s youngest son, that his dad left Lydia for a younger woman.
Making new friends? With Lydia, Chris is trying to do so, and sensing Lies’s loving nature and her desire for him to have “new adventures” and make “new friends,” we think she would approve. Toward the end of the episode, he tells their three sons, that he wants “to keep going,” that he doesn’t “want to be alone. I don’t want to wake up alone. I don’t want to come home alone to an empty house where every step reminds you of someone who’s not there anymore. I wasn’t made for that.” Son Ben also seems to make a new friend, Lydia’s son Jack. In the final scene, Chris and the three sons, are all sitting down for dinner, along with Lydia and Jack, and he and Ben (who is gay) briefly hold hands under the table. The scene also suggests that, as wife/mother Lies desired, her “darling men” are trying to “comfort each other.”
Although Episodes Two and Three were my favorites, other individuals of different ages, ethnicity, gender preferences, or life experiences might prefer some of the other four stories. Episode One depicts an unmarried female pole-dance instructor, Roos, who takes a chance on going out with a guy (and having sex with him) who posts a note indicating he saw her in a park and would like to get to know her.
Episode Four (“The Eye of the Storm”), like Three, deals with coping with the death of a spouse. And again, the spouse who died was a wife, only she was much younger than the wife in Episode 3, and the couple’s two sons died along with her due to 2017’s Hurricane Irma. It was a Category 5 storm that hit Caribbean islands, especially hard. Dwayne, the surviving husband, lived with the deceased wife and two sons in the southern part of one of these islands, St. Maarten (St. Martin), an autonomous state within the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
Dwayne’s now living in Amsterdam with his second wife, Marisa, and their two darling little girls—all the members of both families are Black. The main plot of the story deals with Dwayne trying to put the fate of his first family firmly in the past—viewers see him recalling past scenes with them—and instead focusing more thoroughly on his second family. Marisa is a loving wife and mother, but sometimes becomes frustrated with Dwayne’s difficulty in focusing more on his newer family. Like Episodes Two and Three, this one is an honest and well done portrayal of a spouse (Dwayne) trying to cope with the impairment or death of a spouse, only this time made even worse by the additional loss of two sons.
Episodes Five and Sex concern themselves with more modern love relationships. In Five, Colette and Naomi are engaged in a lesbian relationship, decide they want to have a child, and persuade their friend Boaz to donate his sperm so that Naomi can get pregnant. But Colette, who is a writer, has second thoughts about becoming a parent, with all the time-consuming responsibilities that entails. As in most love relationships the couple have their disagreements, but also display their love for each other.
Episode Six deals with the more problematic idea of a couple with two sons, the oldest a teenager, trying to love each other while pursing an “open marriage.” But wife Lil’s pursing a relationship (including sex) with her friend Bruno puts a strain on the marriage. The fact that Lil is Black and husband Guus is not does not seem to cause any special problems, but he is bi-sexual and sometimes also has sexual encounters with men. The last scene, however, depicts one happy family, or perhaps we should say two happy families because Lil, Guus, their two boys, Bruno, and his wife all have a happy get-together celebrating Bruno’s birthday.
The actors in all six episodes are overwhelmingly Dutch, and hardly any of them will be familiar to U. S. audiences. They demonstrate, however, what should come as no surprise—good acting is not restricted by borders. Overall, “Modern Love Amsterdam” is well worth watching and provides additional perspective on that most complex but vitally important virtue—love.
