'The final conclusion is that I'm hopeless for anything else. (...) From my childhood, I was predestined to become a romantic, decadent prose writer and poet.' These are statements by popular author Gerard Reve, maker of many 'splendid books', who died in 2006. Based on TV extracts, this documentary presents a portrait of a deeply devout, profoundly conservative and at the same time anarchistic man, whose work and assertions are so imbued with irony, that nobody knows where it stops and where earnestness begins. 'You should realise you're just a silly show-off', Reve observes. The film is a succession of legendary TV fragments, like the controversial revelry after the presentation of the PC Hooft Award in the Allerheiligste Hartkerk, complete with brass band and jugglers, followed by interviews with adherents and shocked opponents. Plus some rare footage of a moved Reve, when Maartje van Weegen asks him about his parents after the première of De Avonden, one of the film adaptations of a Reve novel.
