Web Of Collaboration THE ASSAULT

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The Steenwijk family plays board games, reads Spinoza and believes that a sound classical education constitutes an excellent preparation for life. Outside, in January 1945, the war is still going on. But aside from a shortage of food and fuel, it has not troubled this serenely bourgeois Dutch family. And with the Germans obviously headed for defeat, they may perhaps be forgiven the slightly smug aura that hovers about them. It seems as if their faith in the eternal values of liberal humanism has triumphed over the hurly-burly of modern history.

But the 20th century has taught us that it is at precisely such moments that history sets up an importunate clamor on our doorsteps, demanding its due. This is quite literally true in the case of the Steenwijks, for the Resistance has chosen their quiet street as the perfect place to assassinate a particularly vile Nazi collaborator. He is hit in front of a neighboring house, but its inhabitants drag his corpse next door so that the reprisals, which everyone knows will be swift and terrible, will be directed at the Steenwijks.

As indeed they are. By the time this night of terror is finished, there is only one survivor: the youngest son Anton (played with stunned bravery by Marc van Uchelen). Inevitably, these events constitute the shaping trauma of his life, and The Assault becomes for the most part a subtle anatomization of the curious manner in which Anton deals with it.

Or rather does not deal with it. His choice of profession summarizes his psychology: he becomes an anesthesiologist. Another way of putting it is that he tries his best to follow his family's tradition of quietism and indifference to large events. But Holland is a small country, and it is impossible to escape from people who are part of his past. If he will not pursue the evidence that will help explain his life's crucial occurrence, the evidence, as it turns out, will pursue him. Like the furies, the facts are inescapable.

Anton (who is portrayed as an adult by a wonderfully wary actor named Derek de Lint) keeps running into other witnesses to the assault and its aftermath: the underground fighter who was one of the assassins; the woman who helped move the murdered man's body; even the son of the victim. Indeed, Anton, without seeming quite aware of what he is doing, marries a woman who looks like the Resistance heroine with whom he shared a cell on the night of the assault and who, it is revealed, also participated in it (both are played, with a spirit that warms this cool film, by Monique van de Ven).

The Assault is a mystery story in the broadest sense of the word, an attempt to probe the enigmas of a life devoted to psychological denial. It is also a conventional mystery story. There was a reason why that body ended up in front of the Steenwijks' house, and when the key to that puzzle is revealed, moral as well as psychological tumblers fall into place. Director Rademakers is both a careful craftsman and a careful moralist, a man who has the time to pause over the ambiguous nuances of human behavior under pressure and the skill as a filmmaker to exploit them. No fictional film of recent years has more successfully explored the terrain around that crossroad where personal history and megahistory intersect. None has more persuasively placed us inside the skin of man caught in its conflicting, unpoliced traffic.