Karlovy Vary Dispatch. 1.

This festival in the venerable spa town of Karlsbad marks its fortieth anniversary this year. Among the major film festivals, it's still the most local - a question of budget, perhaps, in the struggling Czech Republic - and still the best place to see films from Eastern Europe. Even in that region, so many films are being made that you can't call Karlovy Vary one-stop shopping. Think of it as a place to sample the year's films from the Czech Republic and other countries of the former East Bloc. It's an event to whet your appetite, but not always to satisfy it. 

This year's offerings sampled more than regional specialties - with improved projection, although improving the comfort of seats, like rebuilding Eastern Europe, is still an ongoing project. The festival opened with a screening of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - a new print, we were told - which launched a tribute to Robert Redford. (Given its localness, this festival seems overly awed by stars. Sharon Stone also made an appearance.) Redford was here for the opening, accompanied by the former US  Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, noting that his country had a lot to learn from the Velvet Revolution that set then-Czechoslovakia free from communism in 1989.

Karlovy Vary is also running a retrospective of the films of Sam Peckinpah, including the newly-restored and augmented print of Major Dundee, Peckinpah's wild saga of rogue major Charlton Heston leading a troop of renegade soldiers to fight Mexicans, Apaches, the French and each other in the years after the Civil War. The violent gestural politics (if you can call it that) of this film seemed like sheer fantasy in a country that had transformed itself almost bloodlessly not long ago. Just as much of a fantasy was the worship of the handsome outlaw pair in "Butch Cassidy." The audiences ate it up, but I suspect they thought it was as real as Star Wars or Kung Fu Hustle, which had a packed midnight screening.

For realism, they looked closer to home, just across the border, to Poland.

When I first heard about The Wedding, the new film by Wojtek Smarzowski, a German friend told me: "The Poles think it's a comedy." Since a Polish director did make it, and since it is, after all, a loose update of a play by Stanislaw Wyspianski (which was filmed by Andrzej Wajda), I assumed that the Poles were right. Yet being right doesn't make this film any less dark. It's as black as a comedy can be, while still being funny.

The film's central event brings together family and friends, the past and the future, love and money. This wedding makes sure those components are brought together in the kind of cocktail that challenges you not to vomit. Set in rural Poland, where purity (and brutishness) can be found in every home - or at least we're supposed to think so - The Wedding gives us a look at the new Poland, where the State is just another client with its hand out. It's not flattering. In the elegant opening sequence, well-wishers in a church are well-dressed for the big event. It's the only time when things seem to be right. Within minutes, we see we're in a Poland where nothing is what it's supposed to be, and everything and everybody are for sale, but almost nothing is paid for. It's also a place where weddings go on all night. This one never seems to end.

The film is a dance that spins around wildly, shifting from conflict to conflict, slashing into a different character at each turn. Simply put, Wojnar, the father of the lovely blonde bride, is a nouveau riche flower merchant. We soon see that he didn't make his money legitimately. He's overextended even as he offers the wedding couple an Audi sports car and a honeymoon in Croatia. He can't pay for the band, or for the alcohol, or for the food, or for the wedding videotape. Nor can he get his aged father to hand over a patch of land promised to the car thieves who furnished the Audi. And it gets worse.

Imagine taking an ensemble cast of superb actors (usually a given in Polish films), and then putting violence, vodka, and a corpse into a centrifuge, and then, turning it on for almost two hours. The camera follows it all at a tactile closeness, as the walls get splattered. It would be an understatement to say that The Wedding has a harder edge than Fireman's Ball, to which it's being compared. This is not a film for gentle souls. Poles will wince as they watch an irrefutable picture of what their society has become - if they're not laughing too hard.

More in the next installment on Slovenian comedies, the Karlovy Vary competition, and a discovery or two.

Posted by dwhudson at July 5, 2005 3:21 AM