Oddly, heer sometimes means ‘master’ too.
HM is a Dutch action-mystery, and lovingly pays homage to an earlier era, in which a suave gentleman sleuth drives fast cars, beds beautiful women, and solves mysteries with the help of 1) his faithful butler and 2) a female deputy prosecutor.
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| Schuurmans (R) and Fermin |
It starred Daan Schuurmans as sleuth Valentijn Bentinck, Hubert Fermin as the butler Leo, and Sytske van der Ster as prosecutor Suze (pronounced soo-je) Geleijnse (pronounced he-line-sa). Ferdi Stofmeel played Frensdorf, Suze’s unlikeable workplace nemesis.
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| Sytske van der Ster as Suze, Season 1 |
HM was made in the 2010s, but its photography, production design, and jazz score gives it a 1970s sophisticated-movie-for-grownups feel.
The premise is simple: Valentijn was an orphan who was sponsored by a wealthy benefactor. He took the surname of the kindly orphanage priest, growing up there and at boarding school. Today he can live a playboy lifestyle thanks to a ginormous trust fund, but is troubled by not knowing where he comes from.
Each episode finds him with new cases, which occasionally also divulge (vague) clues in the search for his origins. I suspect the creators had no idea how the quest would eventually end.
I loved it. But a search for additional seasons brought the news that there were just one more season, in 2016— which is not currently broadcast or streamed anywhere— and a 2018 TV movie which is on YouTube.
Heer & Meester, de film (2018), runtime 1:26:13
Subtitles download link
Yes, I got it off YouTube.
It’s an almost Bond-scale finale for Valentijn and his sidekicks. A fake foundation is buying up old bomb shelters, at the same time that people at a campground nearly all fall into comas. Valentijn uncovers an elitist secret society which is planning to release a designer virus, cleansing the world of the less intelligent people, while those with high IQs hide in… the now-gentrified bomb shelters. The trail of clues leads from a beach in The Hague, to the villain’s lair under an Italian castle. Stops along the way at Valentijn’s memory palace serve to tie together his series-long search for his true origins.
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| Season 2: Sophie van Winden and Ferdi Stofmeel (L) |
MISC
In Season 2 Suze was replaced as the main sidekick by Floor (Flor in any other language), played by Sophie van Winden. She doesn’t appear to be open to romance with our hero the way Suze was.
In season 2 it appears Valentijn tracked down his benefactor, a Lord Cavendish in London.
Valentijn has taken over as the figurehead leader of the Cavendish business empire.
Something happened in Season 2 which caused Valentijn to stop helping the Prosecutor’s Office.
Frensdorf is still around, although he now seems to be only half-unlikeable.
My goal with the subtitles was just to make them watchable. I used Google and Vosk to translate Dutch subtitles to English. From there I did a comprehensive clean up— timings, idioms, syntax, etc.
The .srt file with official subtitles had them for only spoken Dutch. Other languages spoken— mostly English, but also some German and a little Italian— were translated in burned-in subtitles IN DUTCH
NOTES
There are only a few notes, and none about translation. The few alternate or scratch translations I had to make were very minor.
3’01”: Valentijn is dropping like a rock toward The Hague, in the center of the shot is the intersection of Gevers Deynootweg and Zwolsestraat. De Pier is sticking out into the North Sea.
He and his rescuer make their landing in front of the Grand Hotel Amrath Kurhaus.
The Illuminate office is off the atrium of the Red Elephant (28’27”), a red brick building with a tower (31’16”) that was once the offices of Esso Oil. I guess it looks sort of like an elephant raising its trunk. Sort of.
Valentijn goes looking for Prof. Kessens at Leiden University. However the establishing shot (43’06”) is of the manor house at the Villa Ruys estate, a national landmark located at 4 Paauwlaan in Wassenaar.
53’15”: The hotel in Turin is on the Piazza Carlo Alberto (that’s him atop his monument). The entrance is really the front door of the National Museum of the Italian Unification; the luggage trolley is a nice touch. In the background is the Turin National University Library.
Valentijn hops off the scooter at 11 Via Maria Adelaide, then walks across the street and into the Sanctuario della Consolata church.
Illuminate’s castle hideout (63’43”) is the Forte di Bard, a 19th century fort in the Aosta Valley, which is where Rocco Schiavone lives.
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