Tag: Czechoslovakia

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: František Vláčil
CAST: Josef Kemr, Magda Vášáryová, Frantisek Velecký
MY RATING: 5/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: In medieval central Europe, a young virgin promised to God is kidnapped and raped by a marauder whom her religious father seeks to kill in return.


In an interview on the Criterion Blu-ray of Marketa Lazarová, a British scholar of Czech film history acknowledges the film’s density and purposely obscure/unclear editing.  In so many words, he says, “But it’s unique, and you don’t always have to understand something unique.”

I mean…maybe not, but it couldn’t hurt.  Marketa Lazarová was named the best Czech film of all time in 1998, sports a 100% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, and is included in the invaluable compendium 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.  It is loaded with visual style and inarguable beauty in widescreen black-and-white.  The production and costume designs are utterly convincing, placing us firmly in medieval Europe with a degree of authenticity I’ve rarely seen even in modern films set in that era.  But a model of storytelling it is not.  This movie further reinforces my tendency to shy away from “avant-garde” films of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

(And yet I really enjoyed watching Godard’s Weekend…go figure that one out.)

In broad strokes, the story begins with marauders raiding a traveling party and kidnapping the son of a nobleman.  The marauders are all the sons of a battle-scarred local lord, Kozlík, who rules his territory from a medieval castle and treats his sons barely better than he treats his prisoners.  Word of the kidnapping reaches the King, so Kozlík sends his eldest son, Mikolás, to pressure their neighbor, Lazar, to join forces with Kozlík in case the King decides to retaliate.  Lazar refuses, so Mikolás kidnaps Lazar’s virginal daughter, Marketa, just as she was about to join a convent.

Seems pretty straightforward, right?  “A” leads to “B”, “B” leads to “C”, and the gears of a bloody revenge story are set in motion.  But, man, I don’t know if I was in the wrong headspace or what, but I was unable to follow what was going in.  We’re presented with shots that, even with subtitles, don’t clue us in on who we’re looking at, or why.  Some of these shots are straight-up visions/dreams, intermixed with shots in the present, going to a flashback, then to a flashback IN the flashback, then back again and round and round.  Honestly, I felt like I was failing some kind of test.  I had to watch the special features to realize that one of the film’s sequences showed someone having sex with his sister…but even now, I’m not sure they meant with his OWN sister or someone ELSE’S sister.  When I need a flow-chart to follow a film’s progress, I’m not inclined to keep watching.

But I did.  Because, doggone it, there are striking cinematic flourishes that qualify this film as a visual tour de force.  The theme of hunting is referenced right from the start with a pack of wolves (or at least wild dogs) running through the snow toward an unseen quarry.  More than once, we see shots of antagonists and protagonists creeping stealthily through tall grass or tree branches either towards their prey or away from their tormentors.  Two particularly arresting shots look like they were taken from the Stanley Kubrick playbook; you’ll know them when you see them.

Which brings me to something I was thinking about while watching this movie: Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.  There is no denying 2001’s place in cinema history as a genuinely important film.  But show it to someone who’s never read the book or the infinite number of essays on the film, and give me odds on whether they will correctly interpret the last twenty minutes, at least in terms of the novel’s explanation.

Marketa Lazarová is not quite as cryptic as 2001, but it is definitely the same species.  In a movie that runs two hours forty-two minutes, I finally got a grasp on the basic nuts and bolts of who was who around the 90-minute mark.  The style and cinematography are stellar, but they were not enough to keep me as interested as I would have been had it been edited more conventionally.  I could go into more details about the story, about the girl Marketa’s plight, how she falls in love with her captor/rapist, the gritty battle scene, the film’s elaborate intertitles separating discrete sections of the film from one another, but it would feel false, because, ultimately, the film’s storytelling method left me not caring what happened one way or the other.

There are plenty of other films that broke new cinematic ground and still managed to be engaging and compelling, so many that I won’t even try to list any here…you know what they are.  One day, I will watch Marketa Lazarová again, perhaps with my Cinemaniac buddies, to maybe catch what I missed the first time around.  On that day, I will welcome a lively discussion of my rightness and/or wrongness of my first experience with this film.  For now, my opinion is that uniqueness alone is not enough to make a film enjoyable.

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTORS: Ján Kadár, Elmar Klos
CAST: Ida Kaminska, Jozek Kroner
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: During World War II, a carpenter in the Fascist Slovak State is appointed “Aryan controller” of a Jewish widow’s store.


The first hour or so of the 1983 TV movie The Day After features some of the tensest filmmaking I’ve ever seen.  There is something terrifying about how these people go about their normal lives as their world spirals towards Armageddon.  As the sirens begin, the tension reaches a breaking point when you realize it’s only a matter of a few unstoppable minutes before the literal apocalypse.

Oddly enough, that movie came to mind as I watched the Czech film The Shop on Main Street from 1965.  Set around the year 1942, it takes place in a small town in Fascist-controlled Slovakia.  Tono Brtko is a poor, timid carpenter with a nagging, avaricious wife whose sister is married to a high-ranking official in the local Fascist government.  Tono is not a fan of the Fascists, not for any overtly political reasons, but because he doesn’t like his brother-in-law, who has always treated him as a peasant, even before he was a local bigwig.

One drunken night, the brother-in-law, Markus, gives him some news: as part of a new law, Tono has been appointed as the “Aryan controller” of a small shop owned and operated by an elderly Jewish woman, Rozalia.  It’s now Tono’s job to take over the shop until the government figures out exactly what to do with Rozalia and the other local Jews.

(Interestingly, the Nazi swastika is not seen until the film’s closing sequences, but the Third Reich crouches just out of sight.)

What happens next is a curiously effective combination of suspenseful drama and outright comedy, approaching farce.  In that sense, it’s tempting to compare this movie to Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful, but the tones are very different from each other.  In Benigni’s film, the main character was impish and clownish, an Italian Marx brother.  In The Shop on Main Street, Tono’s dimwittedness leads more organically to scenes of comic misunderstanding between him and the hard-of-hearing Rozalia.  When he tries to explain the situation to her, she believes he’s been hired to be her assistant.  When he arrives to the shop on Saturday morning, he can’t understand why the shutters are still closed well past opening hours.  “It’s the Sabbath,” she says simply as she potters around the back room where she lives.

The comedy of these situations made me laugh, but the underlying seriousness of the plot snuffed it out.  Tono’s wife is constantly nagging him to find out where the old lady has hidden her wealth, since everyone knows Jews are miserly and stingy.  Tono and some of his friends talk about being careful not to be branded as a “Jew lover.”  Tono, to his partial credit, is not as gung-ho as some of his other friends or his wife.  He even mocks Hitler in a strangely tense scene, using a comb as the infamous moustache.  But his conscience only goes so far, and he does his best to just stay under the radar.

Meanwhile, a tower is being built at the center of town to celebrate the Fascist government, and Tono’s Jewish friends can see where this is going and have started packing.  Tono remains certain that, surely, things won’t get TOO bad.  A loudspeaker is installed near the town square.  And then every Jewish citizen receives a notice in the mail…

Beneath the comic personalities and situations, the looming threat of something even worse than run-of-the-mill fascism hovers over the town.  Tono wages a constant war with his conscience.  He’s unable to flout the law by simply refusing to take over Rozalia’s shop because that would mean possible arrest.  But he has no interest in forcing this elderly woman out on the street.  (He’s like me in the early days of Covid: things just can’t POSSIBLY get THAT bad…can they?)

I was riveted by this film.  It felt shorter than its 2-hour-plus running time because of the tension running under everything like a thrumming power line.  In that way, it’s almost Hitchcockian.  And to top it off, this movie had to pass Soviet censors before being released, which absolutely blows my mind for some reason.  The Shop on Main Street plays like a scaled-down version of Schindler’s List, or maybe more like a prologue.  By focusing on a tree instead of the forest, this small-scale movie makes its point just as eloquently and as powerfully as Spielberg’s masterpiece.