A Film a Week - City of Fathers / Mesto otcu

 previously published on Cineuropa

It has been thirteen years since the veteran Czech filmmaker Zdeněk Tyc directed a feature film, the latest until now being Like Never Before. The filmmaker behind Seize the Day (1996) and El Paso (2009), among other titles, is now back with another easily accessible and audience-friendly piece. City of Fathers has just premiered at the 60^th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival as part of the Special Screenings section.

Father and son don't seem to have much in common, except for a shared first name (Richard) and the modest flat in a socialist-era housing block in a small Czech city they call home. Richard Jr, nicknamed Ríša (Tomáš Vravník, glimpsed in the 2020 thriller Scumbag), is in fact a gentle factory worker who hides behind the mask of a tough guy, listening to punk rock and keeping his "part-time" girlfriend, Lenka (Pavlína Štorková) – who raises her son, Miša, alone – at arm's length. Richard Sr (Vladimír Javorský, most recently seen in Agnieszka Holland's Franz) is a neat, well-mannered retired teacher who prefers operatic arias and Ingmar Bergman's films. The two men have lived alone ever since Ríša's alcoholic mother, Renata, left them, and Ríša has spent much of his life trying, unsuccessfully, to re-establish contact with her: he knew she lived on the streets as a beggar and gave her change whenever he encountered her, but she never once engaged him in a proper conversation.

When Renata suddenly dies, and Ríša learns from her drinking buddies that his real father might be one of the members of Kokoti (meaning "The Dicks"), an old communist-era punk rock band, he sets off on a journey of investigation – first online, then in person, in the nearby city of Ostrava. As he tracks down the three "candidates" – a family man and fresh grandfather, a trashy horror film director, and a violent drunk – in order to collect swabs from them for DNA testing, he risks falling off the wagon of sobriety himself, but also learns a thing or two about who he really is.

Yes, the story at the heart of City of Fathers is almost as old as cinema itself, told and retold endlessly, yet it still serves different geographical and political contexts equally well. That said, this type of film is better suited to general theatrical release – and even Sunday-afternoon TV slots – than to the festival circuit. The reason might lie in Tyc's directorial approach, which is serviceable and efficient, but also somewhat textbook.

That said, it would be unfair to call the film entirely flavourless: Roman Vojkůvka's script delivers plenty of the typically Czech dry humour, in situations that are somewhat predictable yet still play out in an entertaining way. The camerawork by Tomáš Kresta, meanwhile, captures a contemporary small-town Czechia rarely seen on the big screen, while the soundtrack – drawing on songs from both older and newer local punk rock bands – works effectively as commentary on the characters, their actions, and the environment they inhabit.

The true heroes of the film's success, however, are its actors. The chemistry between the two leads is excellent and so is their comedic timing. As a bonus, the supporting cast of character actors is also on top of its game, following the leads with real awareness, and the director puts the ensemble to good use, wringing out both laughs and moments of genuine emotional resonance. In the end, City of Fathers is a passable, even pleasant watch that doesn't demand much of the viewer.

A Film a Week - Tatabojs.doc

 previously published on Cineuropa

Virtually every country in the world has at least one music act that pretty much everybody there knows and loves, and which lasts through the ages either by being consistent or by constantly reinventing itself. For the Czech Republic, this “one” band could be Tata Bojs, the members of which have been gracing stages since the late 1980s, constantly reinventing themselves, but staying faithful to their artsy approach to pop and rock music. The band has now got its own documentary, Tatabojs.doc, directed by experienced filmmaker Marek Najbrt, best known for his works Protektor (2009) and Polski Film (2012). The premiere took place at the Karlovy Vary IFF, as a Special Screening.

The history of Tata Bojs is an eventful one, but is pretty much devoid of turmoil and conflict. The band was founded by two life-long friends from the Hanspaulka neighbourhood of Prague, Marek Hunat/Mardoša (on bass guitar) and Milan Cais (on drums and vocals), as the final incarnation of the projects they had been involved in since elementary school. A string of guitarists passed through the band, while the keyboards, samplers, additional vocals and drums were added progressively as the group went through various phases. Tata Bojs started as an infantile teen punk-rock band that gained the general public’s attention and was one of the few to survive the transition from the drab late-socialist 1980s to the more liberated 1990s.

Since the design of the cover for their first album, the visual arts have been an important part of their expression and shows. Their second album, Futuretro, traced the general outline of their musical explorations in combining pop, rock and electronic influences, while their fourth, Nanoalbum (2004), was part of a wider artistic project involving Nanobook and the Nanotour DVD (2005), which earned Tata Bojs the national Anděl Award for Best Group. The band continued to experiment with their expression on later albums, remaining one of the most appreciated acts in the country.

We get to see all of this in a series of behind-the-scenes observations, as well as interviews with band members, the musicians’ parents, friends, collaborators and fans, lensed competently by Jan Baset Střitežský, plus archival footage from the concerts as well as from the musicians’ home collections. This is further spiced up by some animated intermezzos edited into the fabric of the film in snappy fashion by Petra Maceridu. However, Najbrt and his co-writer, Robert Geisler, wanted to make something more than a basic music documentary that celebrates the lengthy career of a beloved band and the friendship between its members. So, they introduced a “film within a film” series of sequences featuring men in space suits, which is close to the type of act the band would use for their concert choreography or music videos. It adds a little “something” to the documentary’s dynamism, but it is still not enough to qualify Tatabojs.doc as a completely “outside the box” documentary.

In the end, Tatabojs.doc is a decent piece of work that does justice to the band, and their music, art and friendship, but it preaches to the converted because the band itself is quite hard not to like. However, the film’s reach will be limited to the Czech Republic and maybe some of the neighbouring countries where Tata Bojs might be a bit of “a thing”, as the band’s music and art, and the film itself, are not that easy to translate into another context, and thus it will not win over any new international fans.

A Film a Week - She Came at Night / Prišla v noci

 previously published on Cineuropa

There must be a reason why there are so many mother-in-law (or father-in-law) jokes in every language and culture. Family life is hard, and people who share genes, not to mention those who are related only by marriage, do not necessarily have compatible personalities. Jan Vejnar and Tomáš Pavlíček’s She Came at Night, which has just premiered in the Special Screenings section of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, takes a relatively ordinary family situation and slowly turns it into an extreme one.

Jirka (Jiří Rendl, glimpsed in a number of recent Czech films like Droneman, Charlatan and Zátopek) and Aneta (Annette Nesvadbová, most active on television) are an ordinary, young, urban couple. She is exhausted at her hospital job as an ergotherapist, while he is a freelance translator, currently busy translating a book of Soviet-era Latvian jokes. They have their minor niggles, but their real problems will occur when the titular “she” comes one night.

“She” is Jirka’s mother, Valerie (Simona Peková, in full-on diva mode), who apparently has no place to stay after her latest partner left her, and she asks her son – who knows full well her history of mess-ups and, perfectly reasonably, has a foreboding sense that chaos will ensue – if she can stay for just one night. One night turns into several days, and then weeks, while Valerie invades the couple’s privacy and meddles in their life and their choices further and further. As a consequence of her presence in their day-to-day life and their flat, the rifts between Jirka and Aneta slowly get deeper and wider. But the culmination, and the point where the movie veers from sitcom into horror-like territory, comes when Valerie brings along her newest boyfriend (and he brings his friends), and they take over the apartment completely.

Pavliíček already has some experience with the feature-length format and comedy as a genre (as demonstrated by his previous films Totally Talking and Bear With Us, which both premiered at Karlovy Vary), while Vejnar has made a name for himself with genre-infused shorts enveloped in an unsettling atmosphere. In theory, She Came at Night would seem like the perfect way to marry their previously established poetics, and the blend they make together is smooth and seamless. Along with several smart moves, like the already handheld camerawork by Šimon Dvořáček getting more fidgety and editor Jakub Vansa’s cuts getting more rapid, with frequent “visits” to the close-ups on Valerie’s face whenever she starts one of her monologues, the key thing the filmmakers get right is making the transition between the genres and their respective atmospheres slow and gradual, as the tension between the three characters builds up.

The helmers also get the casting choices spot-on and work with their chosen actors sure-handedly, leaving them enough freedom for interplay. With his permanently “long” face, Jiří Rendl is convincing as the non-alpha male in the couple, while Anette Nesvadbová is compelling as an overworked and fed-up woman on the verge of simply not being able to take it any more. However, it is Simona Peková who steals the limelight here, making her character a notable addition to the mother-from-hell type and contributing significantly to the fact that She Came at Night is not just an easy watch, but also an accomplished cinematic effort.

A Film a Week - Snake Gas / Hadí plyn

 previously published on Cineuropa

There have been so many failed, unproduced film adaptations of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness before the successful and now-legendary one, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). Coppola proved that a seemingly unadaptable piece of literature is actually adaptable enough if interpreted loosely. Since then, there have been movies that have drawn at least some of their inspiration from Conrad’s novella, such as Fabrice du Welz’s Vinyan or James Gray’s Ad Astra, but now is the right time for a new, meticulous and thoroughly recontextualised take on the source material.

Ready or not, here comes Snake Gas, written and directed by Daniel Jařab, whose previous works include historical and genre-influenced pieces like Vaterland – A Hunting Logbook (2004), Head - Hands – Heart (2010) and Secret Agent (2020). This modern and European take on Conrad’s work has just premiered in Karlovy Vary’s Special Screenings section, and although its angle is pan-European, it might prove to be a tougher sell than expected for international distribution.

Our hero is Robert Klein (Stanislav Majer), whose cosy existence as a teacher in France gets interrupted by the news of the disappearance of his brother Emanuel (Václav Vašák), whom he barely knew. While tending to the affairs that his brother left unfinished, Robert gets asked by the brother’s business partner to take a trip to an unnamed place where Emanuel hunted eels and sent them, canned, to a Japanese importer. The anonymous location that looks like the Danube Delta in Romania is, however, populated by various agents of global powers, desperate migrants and adventurists, while being de facto ruled by the energy company NAG, whose primary concern is drilling for gas in the protected area.

Robert gets special treatment there, since everybody seems to be looking for Emanuel, who has supposedly gone rogue and made his own makeshift kingdom. He travels first by car, then by boat, accompanied by company man Engel (Martin Pechált) and two guys who know the area well enough – Rudolf (Braňo Mosný) and Aleš, aka Lobo (Dalibor Buš) – but as the trip progresses, and as they edge closer to Emanuel’s darkness, the closer they get to their own inner darkness, with rifts appearing within the gang and shifts in power occurring as every person reveals their own true face.

The idea of using such a classical piece of literature as a starting point to comment upon the state of the world today – complete with capitalism running rampant, governments just waiting for an excuse for conflict, refugees and migrants stuck between a rock and a hard place, and so on – is certainly an ambitious one, and it might even make sense. The trouble, however, lies in the execution, which is not always the deftest, even though the acting is solid throughout, with Majer outstanding as a refined man encountering darkness for what is perhaps the first time. Meanwhile, Oleg Mutu’s naturalistic cinematography in murky colours is quite fitting. The core of the problem lies in Jařab’s screenwriting and directing, which both rely too heavily on broad strokes and predictable tricks, such as the extensive use of pseudo-philosophical voice-over narration, some nightmarish dream sequences and the horror-like loop of Jakub Kudláč’s synth score. In the end, Snake Gas seems more like a lower-budget, TV-orientated Euro-thriller riff on Apocalypse Now, rather than a proper contemporary reading of Heart of Darkness, although it is still a decent watch.