Karlovy Vary Dispatch. 1.

In the old spa town of Karlsbad, filled with rich new Russians and old Germans taking the waters, the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival is marking its 42nd edition with its annual survey of East European and Czech films along with its sampling of world cinema.

It opened with an act of courage from none other than Renée Zellweger, one of this year's special guests - and in this case, the courage didn't involve co-starring with Jim Carrey in anything. The blonde star was here to honor the Czech animator Bretislav Pojar, now 83, who is being awarded the festival's Crystal Globe for lifetime achievement. It was clear that Zellweger hadn't heard of the filmmaker until she was asked to hand him the award onstage, although she did learn to pronounce his name haltingly, in her best starlet's voice.

Updated.

According to a press release pasted to the desk at the festival press office, the Texan actress also agreed in extremis to present the prize, since the white ball gown that she was supposed to wear for the act was lost on route. Usually when a celebrity "loses" property, you can assume that it's stolen. She appeared in a black top and jeans. No one seemed to mind, not even the president of the Czech Republic in attendance, not even Pojar, who was game enough to limp across the stage, as he did yesterday when some of his films were shown. Had Pojar ever heard of Zellweger before?

Pojar's films, which incorporate elements of dada and Bauhaus collage, have been some of the festival's best moments. There's a lightness in his stories and characters that you find in the most beguiling fairy tales, which open up to darkness once you look at them closely. They call to mind the novels of Antoine de St Exupery or the delicate paintings of Paul Klee that create exotic landscapes or grotesque scenes in a few square inches. So far my favorite is the stop-motion animation The Lion and the Song (1959), a fable set in the desert. A harlequin enters the landscape, playing an accordion. Lizards, a fox and an antelope hear his music and watch his moves, adroitly moving in and out of sight, an effect that Pojar achieves with a magical deftness.

These creatures understand fear because they have lived under the regime of the lion, who stalks, kills and eats the harlequin. Yet the lion commits a fatal mistake in making too much a pig of himself, even ingesting the accordion, which plays whenever he breathes, revealing his presence and denying him the element of surprise. The great hunter starves to death. Years later, when another traveler passes through the area, he finds the lion's bones there. It's a simple lesson. This is nothing if not an allegory about the self-destructiveness of all-consuming power. Did the Czechoslovak authorities feel threatened by Pojar, as they should have been? Perhaps that's why he left the country in the mid-1960s and emigrated to Canada. (He moved back in recent years.)

Before he left, Pojar made another satirical gem, Bombomanie (1959), a cartoon warning about the dangers of playing with toxic chemicals. Think of it as an allegory about nuclear weapons. We call them weapons of mass destruction today. It starts as a boy with a chemistry set fools around and blows up his room, and then destroys his house. Next the bombs head up the food chain. Then the police get hold of chemicals, and broaden the damage, and then absurdly pompous political leaders take things to even worse effects on a larger scale, with all the bombast that you might expect. Finally, as the world seen from space is observed by a dog in a satellite (this is 1959, remember?), the Earth blows up, and the politicians and officers whom we watched prepare the conflagration are catapulted into space beyond the vanishing point. They're gone, but so is everything else.

Films like Bombomanie remind you that even the censors of the communist days couldn't kill surrealism in Czechoslovakia. Once again, there's a sweetness to Pojar's storytelling, but a dark grim foreboding about the future. I can only assume that Pojar got away with this subversive satire because, following the official propaganda of the time, the Czechoslovak government believed that the public thought that only the Americans could be capable of such stupidity.

In crutches on the stage on Sunday, Pojar was the wry, sweet man that you would expect him to be, telling a mostly young audience (it was encouraging to see so many kids born after 1980 there) that the gatekeepers of the television business tend to keep films like his from being made, and certainly from being seen. Even in the Cold War, and even in the dark days of Czechoslovakia, and they were indeed dark, short films were shown before each theatrical feature. This enabled Pojar to make his animation on film. We're lucky to have it.

So far the competition is predictably hit or miss. The Art of Negative Thinking [site] from Norway describes itself as a feel-bad comedy by Bard Breien, whose previous credits include the feature Frank's Prolapse. Its ensemble of characters are from a group therapy session for the severely handicapped, as angry as they are disabled. And they are indeed very disabled. There's a stroke victim who can only groan when we first meet him. A doll-like blonde with porcelain skin is in a wheelchair from the results of a mountain-climbing accident. An old woman whose husband abandoned her is in a neck-brace. And our hero is Geirr, who is in a wheelchair after a traffic accident. He sits in his upstairs room at home and smokes pot to the sounds of Steppenwolf - he must have gotten a hell of an insurance settlement. But he's angry. His pretty wife is now sleeping with the handsome tanned coiffed husband of the blonde in the other wheelchair, and Geirr is boycotting the group sessions. The sessions rely on a novel approach to readjusting victims of traumatic injury to mainstream society. To minimize outbursts of anger, or to contain them, the therapist passes around a "shit bag," into which members of the group spew out their frustrations.

The action unfolds over a long night after the therapy group arrives at Geirr's comfortable house, to anything but a welcome. After a revolt against the therapist, the members of the group turn against each other. It's nasty. There's no one angrier than a quadraplegic who thinks you haven't pitied him enough, at least not here. Mix in some vengeful sex and alcohol (consumed, in case you haven't guessed, by people who are not supposed to be drinking) and you'll get the idea. Many of our folks get close to suicide, or simply fail when they attempt, and there is a game of Russian roulette. By dawn the house is trashed, but all our patients seem happier, having taken things into their own hands. Is this empowerment of the incapacitated a proto-libertarian critique of Norway's famous welfare state? I suppose that you could view it that way, although the film seems produced to achieve a more obvious political incorrectness. For those who are looking for physical comedy, there is plenty of it, but this is still a Norwegian film. You'll need to read the subtitles to get the jokes.

Bard Breien's movie is shot in small rooms, and plays like theater. It looks as if it was adapted from a play, an effect that's compounded by the fact that in Norway most actors have no choice but to do most of their work on the stage. Breiein knows how to make a competent film, although the unexpectedly wholesome conclusion built on awareness that comes from booze and brawling makes us wonder if he knows how to end one.

The eponymous hero of Karger [site], directed by Elke Hauck, faces his own handicaps. In an unnamed East German town, he loses his industrial job when French investors buy the firm and downsize it (it's the least the French can do, given what the Germans did to them for much of the last century), his wife leaves him, and he struggles to see his daughter. To make things worse, the only color in his city seems to be gray, and he drinks with the constancy of a divorced, downsized and despondent soul who knows his fate. I've seen this film or versions of it many times before. The Germans seem to be producing these movies the way they used to produce Volkswagens - and it's contagious. There was a Finnish story that resembled Karger in the KVIFF competition just last year. Predictably, Karger recycles the pessimistic tour of another corner of East Germany, which seems to prefigure what's in store for much of industrialized Europe. Still, I can't imagine that even Germans would go to see this grim film for entertainment, although an American remake with a star might have a chance. Renée Zellweger, maybe.

Update: Take a look at Mark Rabinowitz's shot at indieWIRE of David with Baltasar Kormákur in Karlovy Vary.

Related: Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net: "The death of two young girls some thirty years apart set in motion a story that will eventually encompasses the story of two fathers in particular and an entire nation in general in Baltasar Kormákur's masterful Myrin (Jar City)."

Posted by dwhudson at July 2, 2007 12:18 AM