Karlovy Vary Dispatch. 2.

Karlovy Vary has always been viewed as one-stop shopping for the cinematic traveler who seeks his annual dose of films from Central and Eastern Europe. I'm wary of any one-stop shopping since it lets you be convinced that this is all you need to do. That said, Karlovy Vary is still an essential event, among others, for cinema in that part of the world. For Czech films, it's even more important.

As always, what KV had to offer was mixed. Let's start with the least encouraging trend in Czech film - the utter commercialism of movies that were made with one aim in mind, making money. I'll name only one of those films, Taming Crocodiles, by Marie Polednáková, which was a melding of two television sitcoms on TV Nova, the commercial Czech channel (owned by American investors, among them the cosmetics Croesus, Ronald S Lauder) that has pushed back the walls of ignorance with mindless game shows and weather-babes. Hammy acting and a predictable script about inane divorced parents and wisecracking school-kids put this film in a class by itself at this kind of festival. One reassuring note, though. As with a lot of local comedy, the humor won't reach beyond the border of the Czech Republic, so it won't travel much farther than Slovakia. I'm told it was successful at the box office, a real hit, which confirms every presumption you might have had about the dangers of playing to public taste.

I'm sure there was criticism that this film was an unabashedly commercial phenomenon and had no place in a film festival. I disagree. If Taming Crocodiles is part of this year's crop of Czech films, then show it. Let the world know what Czechs who don't go to film festivals are seeing.

Another film that came with higher expectations, this time to the competition at the KVIFF, was Beauty in Trouble, by Jan Hrebejk, a story of love and emotional survival in the messy realities of current Czech society. Marcela and her two children live above a huge garage where her husband makes his living taking apart stolen cars. (Bear in mind that car theft is an everyday reality that concerns everyone in the Czech Republic. Car owners could be an instant constituency for this film.) Marcela and her bearish husband fight constantly, mostly over the money that they don't have for the most basic needs, but they have volcanic sex.

The movie takes an important turn when the mechanic and his boys make a fatal mistake and steal the car of a wealthy visitor, a Czech émigré who now owns a vineyard in Tuscany, on a visit to Prague to sell the villa that had been the property of his family. (Another note - the return of émigrés to recover property that had been taken from them by Nazis or Communists has been an acutely sore point in the Czech Republic. Whatever the merits of their claims, these returnees are resented, not so much because they open up historical sores, but because people living on property that was seized years before tend to see that property as their own. It happens in the US with paintings in the possession of prominent collectors that the Nazis seized from Jews in World War II. Why shouldn't it happen with Czech real estate? Not surprisingly, with greed being a strong motivation and possession being a high percentage of the law, there have been cases in which insiders who sit on this disputed property try to keep the outsiders who return from recovering too much.)

That's a subplot of the film, complete with lawyers who are poised to cheat aggrieved émigrés, but the central story develops around recognition that the émigré from Italy is a genuinely decent man, who also happens to be rich and generous. When Marcela is forced to leave the garage after her husband is arrested and imprisoned for his role in the chop-shop gang, she moves in with relatives who conform to the central-casting rules about angry elders with harsh exteriors, hearts of gold, and a whole array of comic idiosyncratic ticks. When the émigré invites Marcela to move into his villa - filled with some of its own characters - the romance that we expected to warm up catches fire.

As Beauty in Trouble becomes a love story focused on a choice between a coarse virile criminal and a courtly wealthy gentleman, there's a parallel observation that the film seems to be making about Czech society - chaotic, unformed, earthy, explosive, but uncivilized until it is educated from the outside. Imagine this all wrapped up in a sweetly sentimental package that seems designed to put a heartwarming trailer together. What choice will Marcela make? If you're at one of the festivals where this film is likely to play, you'll find out.

More to my taste was Skrítek (Dwarves), in which the director Tomás Vorel takes the earthiness of Czech self-portrayal to new heights (or depths). Once again we see an overworked uneducated family, this time in a small city, in which the father carves carcasses in a slaughterhouse and the mother stands robotically at a cash register, scanning purchases in a vast supermarket where the meat that her husband slices up is sold for consumption. If raw meat and the all the fluids that come with it are not earthy, what is? Skrítek has no dialogue, just noises which tend toward anything gross, and not much of a plot, although the father of the family (who could be the Czech equivalent of his counterpart on Married with Children) is having an affair with a blonde buxom meat-cutter from work. Add to the mix an eponymous creature picked from a Czech fairy tale, a kind of water sprite covered with fur who wears a funnel on his head, who observes all this human foolishness.

There's no reverence here. No characters are spared in Skrítek, neither children nor parents, nor the mass of citizens who are drinking or fornicating when they're not cutting cows apart. Nor does the director spare his viewers all the tactile disgust of watching animals being cut up - the same animals that we'll be eating the next day. Think of Skrítek as a slaughterhouse in which a whole society is skewered. Tomás Vorel is quite a butcher, even offering up his own son, who plays the skateboarding teenager in our typical Czech family. His substituting of noises for dialogue is a technique that we associate with short films (although a Hungarian film in which all the dialogue was hiccups showed that the feature form could be sustained this way). Like any quasi-silent movie, it forces him to tell his story in images.

Sticking with the theme of grossness (also present in the festival's international competition), Taxidermia, by György Pálfi of Hungary seems to have won the "can-you-top-this" award. Think of it as three gross tales about a grandfather, his son, and his grandson - a persecuted army orderly (Woyzek in the pigpen) cares for officers and pigs, and fantasizes about women, always getting the two mixed up, even in bed; marathon eating becomes a competitive sport, with champions formed to the task of gobbling up and vomiting out huge tubs of food in front of audiences; the taxidermist son of a gargantuan veteran marathon eater (grandson of the sad sack orderly) stuffs his father after the hulking mass of flesh, to heavy to walk, is killed by his giant house cats who are caught red-mouthed while eating his intestines. Sound appetizing?

It would be too simple to call grossness the last (or the next) frontier, although some critics out there will, but Taxidermia seems to be intent on crossing whatever boundaries of taste that there might be. The film has gotten a huge amount of praise since it premiered at Cannes, and much of it is deserved. György Pálfi succeeded in taking us into a different world - a mess, if you will, of his own making. As happens a lot when a director presents such a confection, however disgusting it might be, there's an odd refinement to the confection, an aesthetic that's finely wrought, the hypnotics of mud. Yet Palfi's real goal seems to be humor. You come out of the film laughing, not analyzing the verisimilitude of the pig shit or the endless rolls in the glutton's stomach. There's a lot of promise here, much as there was in Delicatessen many years ago - in the same way, Taxidermia, if it's marketed right, could conquer the same markets of kids who will go to see it again and again once they're hooked.

From the Rumanian director Corneliu Porumbolu, 12:08 East of Bucharest is in another category of grotesquery: hypocrisy. It is sixteen years after the 1989 downfall of the Ceausescu government, and the owner of a local television station has invited two bumbling men who say they participated in the uprising to reminisce about those events on a call-in program. The amateurish show that was planned as a celebration sheds a little too much truth, all of it uncomfortable. It's bad enough that the two guests are shown by the callers who know them to have been drinking while more courageous citizens were demonstrating. A former Sicuritate (secret police) agent, exposed on the show, calls in to say that he was a mere accountant in the vicious agency, and then threatens the two guests, who are too inept to defend themselves against the self-serving accuser. Some things never change.

Rumania has become the standard for the formerly-communist country in which everyone claims to have been a rebel, when the truth reveals something quite different. (Remember Robert Dornhelm's excellent film on this subject, Requiem for Dominic, set in Timisoara, which accused the country's "reformers" of lying about their communist past when the bodies of Nikolai Ceausescu and his Marie-Antoinette wife were still warm?) Yet hypocrisy crosses borders in the old Warsaw Pact with little trouble. So did the wry humor of Porumbolu's film, which had the Czech audience at the screening I attended roaring with laughter. They knew that they could just as easily be looking at their own country, or any other country nearby. Porumbolu reminds us that even the lowest level of television can be an instrument to tell us something, when you approach it with the proper contempt. Like György Pálfi, he is a director to watch.

Posted by dwhudson at July 8, 2006 9:19 AM