Marleen Stolz in Cloaca (2003)

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The untold truth about long-term friendships is that they tend to bring as much anguish and compromise into our lives as they do joy and love. The Dutch--especially as embodied in film director Willem van de Sande Bakhuyzen--have a keen eye for the faulty connections in interpersonal relationships, and Sande Bakhuyzen’s Cloaca (2003) is a buddy movie more somber and more challenging than those paeans to wisecracker camaraderie generally playing in the suburban multiplex. Four old college pals, now firmly entrenched in the middle age of their forties, have been drawn back to one another by personal difficulties each has and feels he must share with one of the others. Their bonds go back more than twenty years, but in the end will each man’s burden force him to stand alone?