Revis­it­ing Paul Verhoeven’s sex­u­al­ly explic­it answer to Grease

“I’ve got a good head for busi­ness,” says Fien­t­je (Renée Sou­tend­jik). ​“Nev­er had much luck.” Fien­t­je works with her broth­er Jaap (Peter Tuin­man) sell­ing fast food from a mobile stall, and they are cur­rent­ly using a small town out­side Rot­ter­dam as their tem­po­rary busi­ness base, where they will stay until they decide to move on. But we can tell from the way that Fien­t­je, after first arriv­ing in town, looks long­ing­ly through win­dows at a com­mu­ni­ty scene in a bar and a cou­ple next door hold­ing up baby clothes, that she yearns for a more set­tled life.

Her ​‘head for busi­ness’ is expressed most­ly through her trans­ac­tion­al atti­tude towards sex, which she gives out to a police­man to stop their car­a­van being moved on, and to a TV pre­sen­ter (Jeroen Krab­bé) in exchange for a favour. The world­ly Fien­t­je knows how to use her assets to secure a deal. The prob­lem, as she says, is her bad luck, tying her to a life on the road.

Fien­t­je finds dif­fer­ent kinds of hope in three young local men who all – con­verse­ly – dream of escap­ing their provin­cial milieu. Rien (Hans von Ton­geren, who com­mit­ted sui­cide not long after mak­ing the film) is an up-and-com­ing motocross cham­pi­on whose dad runs the local bar. Hans (Maarten Span­jer) has sim­i­lar aspi­ra­tions, but is a much less tal­ent­ed rid­er, while Eef (Toon Agter­berg), who serves as their engi­neer when he is not run­ning his garage and petrol sta­tion, wants to move to Cana­da to get away from his vio­lent­ly reli­gious father.

These work­ing-class motor­heads ooze brag­gado­cio and machis­mo, con­stant­ly boast­ing of their sex­u­al prowess and even try­ing to set­tle their rival­ry for Fien­t­je with a lit­er­al dick-mea­sur­ing com­pe­ti­tion. But deep down they are big soft­ies, with each of their girl­friends com­plain­ing of how ​“limp” they.

Paul Verhoeven’s fifth fea­ture is a com­ing-of-age sto­ry that plays like Holland’s answer to Grease, made two years ear­li­er. After all, here too we have young men try­ing to prove their mas­culin­i­ty and worth through vehic­u­lar rac­ing. When Eef takes to the dance floor in an ear­ly scene, the DJ announces, ​“Wow, here’s the new Dutch John Tra­vol­ta!”, allud­ing to the danc­ing star of Grease (and of Sat­ur­day Night Fever) whom Eef resem­bles (there are also posters of Tra­vol­ta in Fientje’s caravan).

Even the film’s title alludes to Grease: ​‘spet­ters’ is not only a Dutch col­lo­qui­al­ism for ​‘look­ers’ or ​‘hunks’, but also a lit­er­al term for the ​‘splat­ters’ (of mud, engine grease and chip oil) that mark the lives of these three men and Fien­t­je. The big dif­fer­ences are that this is not a musi­cal (although its score does show­case a lot of ear­ly ​’80s hits from the likes of Blondie, Iggy Pop and Michael Jack­son), and that its female out­sider fig­ure Fien­t­je is, unlike Olivia Newton-John’s Sandy in Grease, no vir­gin. On the con­trary, Fientje’s sex­u­al expe­ri­ence and lib­er­al for­ward­ness sit in con­trast with the rel­a­tive imma­tu­ri­ty of her three suitors.

These men’s rites of pas­sage are writ­ten in fail­ure, impo­tence and bad luck, whether Hans’ con­stant trou­ble start­ing or prop­er­ly rid­ing a bike, or Rien’s crip­pling road acci­dent (in which he is paral­ysed from being struck hard pre­cise­ly in the crotch), or gay-bash­ing, tough-guy Eef’s dis­cov­ery, while being gang-raped, of his own deeply repressed homo­sex­u­al­i­ty fol­low­ing repeat­ed fail­ures to get hard with women.

Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, the three friends’ growth into men is set against loca­tions that also reflect trans­for­ma­tion and renew­al: a build­ing site, a train sta­tion under con­struc­tion, and am old-fash­ioned pub that will even­tu­al­ly get the ​‘mod­ernising’ that Fien­t­je observes its needs. For in these young men’s sto­ries, as they become caught up in a col­li­sion of old­er and new­er val­ues, you can also see the painful emer­gence of the Dutch nation from its own Calvin­ist, homo­pho­bic, colo­nial­ist past.

It’s iron­ic, then, that Spet­ters was dis­missed for its offen­sive vul­gar­i­ty, first by the Dutch movie foun­da­tion, who reject­ed the first script Ver­ho­even showed them and only gave him fund­ing when he offered them a watered down revi­sion (he still shot the first script), and then by Dutch Chris­t­ian groups, the police and the press, var­i­ous­ly protest­ing the film’s sup­posed misog­y­ny, homo­pho­bia, anti-reli­gious and anti-dis­abil­i­ty posi­tions, and its gen­er­al amoral­i­ty – even though Spet­ters itself is engaged in a mul­ti­lat­er­al dialec­tic on these issues.

It was cer­tain­ly a sex­u­al­ly explic­it film for its time, with both male and female nudi­ty and occa­sion­al flash­es of hard­core mate­r­i­al, but none of this appears to have neg­a­tive­ly affect­ed its domes­tic box-office per­for­mance in the Nether­lands, where it had over 1.25 mil­lion admissions.

So Ver­ho­even, too, had a good head for busi­ness, if maybe not the best luck. The film’s poor crit­i­cal recep­tion, and the bad rep­u­ta­tion it brought to the direc­tor, would even­tu­al­ly lead Ver­ho­even to leave his home for Hol­ly­wood, and for his own new begin­ning – although the sex­u­al con­tent in Spet­ters would also dis­suade Steven Spiel­berg from rec­om­mend­ing Ver­ho­even to George Lucas as a poten­tial direc­tor of Return of the Jedi.

Still, the Star Wars saga’s loss may well have turned out to be sci­ence-fic­tion cinema’s win, as Ver­ho­even went on to make Robo­Cop, Total Recall and, best of all, Star­ship Troop­ers – all of which are a mil­lion miles from this parochial Dutch drama.

Spet­ters is released on a lim­it­ed-edi­tion two-disc Blu-ray set by BFI, remas­tered in 4K and pre­sent­ed in High Def­i­n­i­tion, on 2 December.