City resident Sarah finds love in Gronings Garnwerd in ‘Bed & Breakfast’

Only Olof and Anne pass by Bed & Breakfasta new romantic comedy loosely based on the success of the popular reality soap and dating show B&B Full of Love. In it, single owners of a bed and breakfast are linked to a new love.

Screenwriter Anna Pauwels (Everything is as it should be) to work: Sarah from the big city receives guests in ‘De Stolpjes’ from her aunt Chou, who desperately needed to go on holiday herself. Will single workaholic Sarah find peace and love in the Groningen countryside? Olof and Anne – not a couple in real life – are the third couple to receive them: they are now so famous through the RTL4 series that they only go by their first names. A few seconds of screen time is enough to create a familiar sight at the breakfast table.

That familiar feeling must come to rural life Bed & Breakfast have it. This film rides so much on the success of the reality series and its countless spin-offs in the form of podcasts, making-ofs and retrospectives that you can hardly speak of a real film adaptation. Bed and breakfast series are booming anyway Gordon Ramsay’s Hotel Hell until Four in a Bed, in which operators spend a night being critical guests and move the bed to check whether all corners have been vacuumed. The Dutch version of Omroep Max is also called Bed & Breakfast: a heart-warming mix of pretentiousness, cuddliness and kindness.

So the time is ripe for a film. When stressed risk analyst Sarah (Sanne Langelaar) arrives in Garnwerd, Groningen, she is so unworldly that it seems as if she cannot even turn on a vacuum cleaner. That will soon change thanks to the hospitable villagers; soon the hair goes loose and the heels are exchanged for sneakers. There are also love candidates: import neighbor Berend who initially seems to be in love with his sander and Klaas, the owner of the village supermarket. It turns out to be a choice between a romantic soulmate and a man who can kiss until the earth trembles. But: “Earthquakes, we don’t joke about that here in Groningen.”

That good-natured atmosphere characterizes this film: this is rural feel-good without cynicism. Sarah learns to vacuum and cook eggs and turns out to be a lot more handy than she thought. She is gently reprimanded for her prejudices about ‘support recipients’ – shouldn’t we be happy that we live in a country where there is a safety net for people without an income? And without putting too much emphasis on it, a diverse cast gives a harmonious and colorful picture of community spirit. This is what a village idyll can look like.

Just like in the series and rural documentary A Few Mornings, an Evening by Astrid van Nimwegen, which is also released in film theaters this week, there is something soothing about looking at rural life. That’s no surprise; both films also remain emphatically on the safe side of the fault lines of our time.

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