The abundance of tricorne hats in Thieves of the Wood is just one of many reasons to indulge this Belgian import, now showing on Netflix.
The chosen millinery of pirates, highwaymen and revolutionary heroes (both French and American), the 18th century’s favourite felt headwear is a potent symbol of adventure, romance and brave acts of derring-do, all of which are handsomely delivered here.
Billing the show as “historical drama” does no justice to a story that begins with the words “I like your shoes”, a man with his ankle tied to a galloping horse, and an eruption of bloody shotgun murders on a highway. Surviving both horse and murders is series protagonist Jan De Lichte (Matteo Simoni), who establishes a more than ordinary level of resilience in this dusty and fantastic first scene.
Duly, a tricorne finds his head.
Once a beloved son of Flanders, Jan is forced to return from fighting for the Prussians in the Austrian War of Succession after committing a seemingly improbable crime. With a bounty on his head and danger afoot in his hometown, he finds refuge in the forest of Aalst with his half-brother Tincke, who’s living in a grubby commune of entry-level criminals under the trees.
Tincke’s gang are muddy, impoverished refugees from the town, stealing and whoring to survive. They have been cast out by an authoritarian mayor who feasts while they starve, who indulges public floggings in lieu of actual justice, and who hunts women to rape in the woods. Jan De Lichte takes umbrage to all of it, and decides to engage some redistribution of wealth with expert marksmanship and tactics learned on the battlefield.
Sound familiar? While Jan De Lichte was certainly a notorious bandit of the 18th century, his reputation as the Flemish Robin Hood stems from his recreation in literature by the Flemish-language literary polymath, Louis Paul Boon, on whose 1957 novel De Bende van Jan de Lichte (The Jan De Lichte Gang) this series is based. Boon came from a working-class family, and left school by 16 to get a job painting cars; an autodidact and provocateur, he would eventually become a novelist, poet, art critic, journalist, Nobel finalist and even – infamously – a writer of pornography. But he was also a fierce organic socialist who never forgot where he came from, or his brutal experiences of poverty and war.
Boon has been criminally under-translated in English, and with Thieves of the Wood dubbed for Netflix, there are limitations on how much of his wit the dialogue can accommodate. But his powerful critique of oppression remains. Questions of natural justice and fairness are teased out through the character of Baru (Tom Van Dyck), a principled, reform-minded bailiff who hunts down good people doing illegal things while he serves the despicable Mayor who has law on his side.
The production design is meticulous in its bleak palette of poverty, which provides texture to the frippery of wealth; scenes of aspirational bourgeoises in wigs eating candied things for breakfast contrast sharply to Jan, Tincke and gang stuck in the forest, swigging moonshine while layered in old coats and mud. There are touches, too, of Boon’s adult eroticism that charge scenes of class tension. A close encounter between characters of different stations is electrified when one’s breath visibly quickens through a silk mask; and in a carriage ride between the humble bailiff and a red-haired young woman in aristocratic dress, Baru fixates on her open red lips, the only part of her face he can see.
The show has its challenges. With not every relevant event story dramatised, the pace is cracking – and the audience is expected to keep up. And – a warning - Thieves of the Wood is no artefact of a culture founded by Puritans; in its world, women whore without sentiment, wounds bleed, people get syphilis, romantic pairings have sex before kissing and even the hero is in palpable need of a bath. But Simoni invests his portrayal of Jan with such a ferocious combination of toughness and innocence that a bit of dirt on his body is hardly a deal-breaker.
Stef Aerts is intense and fragile as Tincke, Charlotte Timmers simmers as the trapped Héloise and Van Dyck is a meticulous, repressed Baru. But the real star of this cracking adventure is a production design that revels in genre to the point that every shot looks as if painted by a Flemish master – and coats, wigs, hoods, even gloves have a character of their own. “I like your shoes,” the show begins, but I stayed for the hats. Socialist highwaymen in tricornes? That’s my kind of television.
The Guardian
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