Winning `Character'

HOLLYWOOD "Character," which won the Oscar for best foreign film, isa superb period piece. Based on the classic Dutch novel by FerdinandBordewijk, it is set in Rotterdam in the '20s.

Its hero (Fedja van Huet) has the most forbidding parentsimaginable: an implacable court bailiff (Jan Decleir), also a bankerand entrepreneur, who after a one-time sexual encounter leaves hisstoic young maid (Betty Schuurman) pregnant.

Defiantly independent, this near-silent woman refuses to marryhim or to accept any financial aid. Their son grows up determined tobe a success in law and banking, which only inflames his father'srage at having been rejected by his mother. There is a …