Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
A powerful Czech drama with comic flourishes; three strange, mesmerizing short films by French legend Agnes Varda; and the first feature made in Iraq since Saddam's fall.
Feb 17, 2005 | Winter's always the best time for little movies. Hollywood's cleaning the gunk out of the bottom of its collective barrel, and trying to milk the Oscar nominations for all they're worth. Harvey Weinstein has taken a break from hype-marketing Miramax's latest batch of middlebrow schmaltz, and more movie screens are available to play that drama from Uzbekistan that people liked at the European festivals, or the latest self-indulgent digital-video experiment that some kid made for $2,000.
Plus we get to suffer for art a little bit, going out through the sleet in our heavy coats and making our way to that little theater where parking is sketchy, the popcorn is lousy (but the coffee rules!), and where if you get there late your seat might be behind a pillar or 4 feet from the screen. All of which is to say that this week's column probably could be twice as long as it is, but my version of suffering for art has been to battle the latest of this season's unpleasant viruses, wrapped in blankets on the couch with a stack of videotapes from publicists. (It's a tough job, etc.)
I actually got out of the house this week to see "Downfall," the sweatily claustrophobic drama about Hitler's final days that marks the first time a German-made feature has confronted Der Führer directly in almost 40 years. (I'll be reviewing that separately on Monday.) Otherwise, though, it's a case of too many movies and not enough time. Martial-arts devotees tell me not to miss the prodigious ass-kicking of "Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior," an old-school fu-flick made without wires or computer graphics, and documentary mavens say good things about "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill," the story of a homeless musician's relationship with, yes, a flock of escaped parrots.
I haven't seen those yet, but I have seen an ambitious drama from the Czech Republic that feels like one of the major imports of the year, the latest work from Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi (which is also the first feature made in Iraq since the fall of Saddam) and a peculiar, sometimes mesmerizing collection of short films about photography by Agnès Varda.
"Up and Down": Prague Spring, or Czech stalemate?
It's been 15 years since Václav Havel's Velvet Revolution, Czechoslovakia has split into two nations, and the harsh realities of capitalism have well and truly sunk in. That's one way to read Jan Hrebejk's powerful drama "Up and Down," which takes us from a seedy Prague pawnshop whose proprietors try to sell a baby on the black market to a frightening cult of proto-fascist soccer hooligans to a prodigiously uncomfortable family reunion in the lavish villa of a prominent professor.
Sony Classics is pushing "Up and Down" as a comedy, which I guess is fair in that the nameless baby (accidentally abandoned on a smuggler's truck by Indian immigrants) doesn't meet with a terrible fate, the semi-reformed hooligan (Jiri Machacek) whose deranged wife (Natasa Burger) buys the baby ultimately tells the authorities the truth, and the professor's embittered former wife (Emilia Vasaryova) and much younger current wife (Ingrid Timkova) avoid murdering each other. But the movie's really an elegantly interconnected portrait of Czech society, from its most respectable upper edges (Havel himself appears briefly) down to its criminal dregs, which imparts one lesson: Get out now.
The one character who has done so already is Martin (Petr Forman, son of the great Czech-American director Milos Forman), the son of ailing professor Otakar (Jan Triska). Various legends have spread around the family about Martin's overseas success, but he knows the truth and so does his father: His photography career never panned out, and he's running a surf shop in Brisbane, Australia. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and Hrebejk and screenwriter Petr Jarchovsky seem to suggest it's better than any of the alternatives on offer. Otakar is a strangled and melancholy figure, his ex-wife Vera is a paranoid and maudlin racist, and current wife Hana, despite her politically correct career as a refugee aid administrator, is a cauldron of repressed misanthropy and anger.
Everyone in "Up and Down" is wrestling with the fact that the Czech nation, for most of its history a source of emigration, is now a European Union member and as such a target for immigrants and refugees from all over the world. There is indeed some comedy here: Two low-rent thugs whom Martin accuses of lifting his wallet (they actually haven't) decide to vent their aggressions by mugging what they think is a Japanese tourist. Unfortunately for them, he's a Burmese refugee (brought in by Hana's agency) and a black-belt martial arts expert.
But even the comic flourishes are underlined with sadness. When his wife brings the Indian pawnshop baby home, soccer hooligan Franta is forced to break with his white-supremacist friends; he loves the baby, even though he knows it's not really theirs and they probably won't be able to keep it. He's a tremendously pathetic character, smart enough to know he's trapped but too dumb to do anything about it. By the time these subtly intertwined stories have wound up and Martin has gone back to Australia, Franta has returned to the hooligan fold and is working as a bouncer in a whorehouse -- where, at least, he gets to beat the crap out of one of the lowlifes who sold that baby in the first place.
"Up and Down" opens Feb. 25 in Los Angeles and New York, with more cities to follow.
