The Dress is essentially a road movie in which the story's movement follows a bright, colorful garment that brings grief to most of those who come into contact with it. The main thread holding all of its episodes and characters together is sex. Or, rather, the inability of the men and women here to synch their sexual desires. That problem is immediately clear in the first two "episodes." One involves a middle-aged man (Henri Garcin) whose wife won't have sex with him, and who leaves him when he grouses about it; the other is about a graphic designer (Khaldoun Elmecky) whose girlfriend leaves him, making sure to tell him he's terrible in bed just as he gets a phone call from the garment company he works for, saying they hate his summer designs.
It turns out both of these men work for the same company. Given one last chance to come up with something acceptable, the designer lifts a design from a dress he sees on a West Asian woman. His new design saves his job, but the company head accepts it over the objections of the cranky middle-aged man, who gets promptly fired for arguing too heatedly with his boss (although the graphic designer is never seen again, we do cross paths with the middle-aged man, whose firing sets him on a sometimes amusing downward spiral). So the boss puts the design into the pipeline. Soon, fabric is made, the dress is designed and the first dress out of the factory heads to a little Main Street store.
But things get rather monotonous. The sexual misconnections keep coming: the messenger taking a fabric sample to the dress designer (Peter Bloc) finds a naked woman running in disgust from the perverse designer's house; the first woman (Elizabeth Hoytink) to buy the dress, in her early sixties, has an attack of some sort when trying to convince her husband to have sex, and eventually dies; and when the dress flies off a clothesline during a storm and the wind carries it to another house, the monotony only gets more, well, monotonous.
The attractive young house cleaner (Ariane Schluter) who claims the dress and wears it on her train ride home attracts the attention of a randy train conductor (van Warmerdam), who follows her home, sneaks into her apartment and tries to force himself on her. Although the woman fends him off, because he pledges his love and is a sex-ready alternative to her sexually sluggish painter boyfriend (Eric van der Donk), she makes a date with the conductor for the next day. Guess what? He tries to force himself on her again. And when she escapes from him by jumping on an empty bus, the driver veers off his route, stops the bus and then he tries to rape her. Even within van Warmerdam's David-Lynch-meets-the-Coen-Brothers world, this is more creepy than amusing. It's hard to smile through this stuff, let alone laugh. But we get another woman threatened with rape after the house cleaner donates the dress to charity, a second-hand boutique owner buys it, shortens the hem and resells it to a teen (Maike Meijer) who wears it on the same train, gets spotted by the same horny conductor and gets another home invasion.
The Dress veers into a more conventionally dramatic sequence after this, which is a welcome relief. But the movie has also pretty much run itself into the ground by this point and, even though it closes on one of its funniest gags, it's just an undernourished comedy that repeats the same gags too often, gags that often aren't clever the first time. Home Vision/Image has also released van Warmerdam's later Little Tony, and the subtitled The Dress disc includes a short interview with the director (in English).
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by Paul Sherman
