The Teacher

Set in Bratislava in the 1980s, The Teacher could be subtitled "portrait of a bully and a blackmailer" because the protagonist, Maria Drazdechova, is indubitably both, and the practiced ease with which she performs those two additional roles while working as a teacher is quite startling.

Her routine is this; at the beginning of the school year, Maria introduces herself to the class and gets the pupils to introduce themselves and state what their parents do for a living while she makes careful notes.  As the term progresses she asks the parents for favours when the favour is received she tells them what the children should be studying for the next class. Those children receive good marks in class and the children whose parents don't give favours don't, whether they've got to grips with what they're learning or not. She's the school Communist party representative, which gives her extra clout.

Things start to come unstuck when it becomes apparent that three of the ablest students have parents who are the least able to do useful favours for Maria. Their consistently poor marks at school prompt those parents to make a formal complaint about Maria and there's a meeting at the school for all the parents and the head teacher. Naturally, the parents of children who are doing well, don't want to rock the boat. The meeting is the dramatic centrepiece of the film, and to our surprise [ spoiler alert ] the complaint against the teacher is upheld. Sadly for Czechoslovakian school kids, the consequence for the teacher is like that of paedophile priests last century - she gets transferred rather than disciplined.

The acting in The Teacher is superb. Zuzana Maurery who plays Maria is completely convincing and her character never misses a beat. She appears completely without conscience and feigns ignorance of her manipulative and unkind behaviour. She devotes every evening to making phone calls to parents and continuing to feather her nest. The anxious parents are also very convincing.

The drawback with this film is that it's slightly too straight and slightly too dark. While Maria's lack of self-awareness and her indefatigability is somewhat humourous, the suffering she causes isn't. The Teacher lacks the warmth of Jan Hrebejk's other films, especially Divided We Fall.

Anne's rating 3/5 Ian's rating 3/5

In the Attic: Who Has a Birthday Today?

Every day Buttercup bakes a cake and her three friends toss a die with 5 blank sides and a birthday cake on the sixth side to determine whose birthday it is today.

Stop motion animation has been popularized by Wallace and Gromit, but tends to be the poor cousin to the output of Pixar et al. This Czech film is based on discarded toys and other rubbish left in a capacious attic. Buttercup is a doll and her three friends are a lazy teddy bear, a pompous, windbag marionette soldier and a frenetic plasticine man with a bottle top hat. In fact it is fascinating to try and identify the junk that appears and often re-purposed into machines by Curie (the engineer and radio announcer), or used by the baddies.

Like many good stories for children there are other themes aimed at accompanying adults. In this case the baddies have over tones of a Soviet style regime, led by a talking golden, glasses wearing bust. This authoritarian leader has hots for Buttercup and Soviet style persuasion techniques, but never fear her friends are coming to her rescue (if the cat doesn't get them).

Ian's rating 3/5
Anne's rating 4/5

Kawasaki’s Rose

Kawasaki’s Rose is a complex origami flower and this film is about peeling back layers in an effort to get at the truth underneath, and raises questions about truth, memory, how much people are culpable for their behaviour under stress and are myths more valuable than the truth?

The film follows a TV film crew as it films a Czech psychiatrist, Pavel Josek, who is going to be awarded an honour in recognition of his role as a dissident under the Communist regime. By coincidence the sound engineer is Pavel's son-in-law, who feels rejected by Pavel. As the TV crew researches Pavel they discover something that changes the direction of their TV show. (If you are keen on plot spoilers look here or IMDB).

This is a film that asks some tough questions that are relevant to many countries that have undergone trauma in the 20th Century. On a domestic level is it worth wrecking a family by exposing the skeleton in the closet? On a national level is the need for heroes worth suppressing the truth for? Who gets to decide what the collective memory is?

Because the number of characters is small (5 in Pavel's family) and 3 or 4 others, and because the secret is more personal than political the film is intimate and understandable. While the film does a good job of explaining the methods used by secret police to put pressure on people. Unfortunately it doesn't adequately explain why governments would want a relatively unimportant individual to either capitulate so entirely or leave the country with no middle ground possible. I guess this is probably more understandable to Czechs than Kiwis. This minor issue aside this was an absorbing movie either as domestic drama or as a political/philosophical dilemma.

I was interested to learn that the Czech Communist Government regarded exile to "the West" as a form of punishment. Which is quite different to the attitude of the Soviet government!

Ian's rating 3.5/5
Anne's rating 2.5/5

Empties

Why would a 65 year old High School teacher resign, then instead of retiring goes out and gets a job as a cycle courier in hilly Prague? Failing that switches to checking in bottles for recycling at the local supermarket. Part of the reason is that he dreads the thought of being at home with his wife. The rejected wife believes her husband is having an affair and gets increasingly jealous, which has always been good fodder for comedy.

Zdenek Sverák the writer/star of Kolya also wrote and starred in this film about getting old without dropping out of life. It also has the message that a sex life and sexual fantasies are not the preserve of the young (even if being a sex object is the preserve of the young and beautiful). This unashamedly a male view of the world could be retitled "Old man behaving badly in Prague".

Ian's rating 4/5
Anne's rating 3.5/5

Beauty in Trouble

Do beautiful women attract trouble? This is probably not a question you'd find as the theme of an English language film. But the Czech are not so politically correct. Marcela is a sexy mother-of-two whose beauty attracts trouble and provides escapes from trouble in equal measure. She is surrounded by a great cast of characters: an extremely pious mother-in-law, a sleazy, insufferable stepfather, an adoring hansom Tuscan-villa owning sugar-daddy, a sneeky priest and her unreliable husband.

This is a comedy about people taking advantage of situations in all sorts of (often illict) ways. From a battle of wills over biscuits between Marcela's kids and her stepfather, to taking advantage of a rich man's attentions to escape her husband, to taking advantage of dodgy bit of surveying to try and blackmail a land owner.

Oh, and Ana Geislerová looks very good in a bikini.

Ian's rating 4/5

I served the King of England

We went to this Czech film on Wednesday morning, the two evening showings being sold out. The Embassy looked pretty full on Wednesday too - obviously lots of other people were seduced by the extremely positive billing it got in the festival programme. It said "pleasing crowds wherever it goes" and "hugely entertaining" so I had high expectations. And I have to say I was disappointed, not because it was a bad film but because it didn't push any buttons for me, and because I felt I was missing the joke.

The hero is a moderately likeable little chap, always falling on his feet until his imprisonment for collaboration with the Nazis. The film begins with his release from prison and is essentially a retrospective of his life up to that point. He begins his working life as a railway station sausage-stall holder and ends it as a millionaire hotel owner, having learned along the way that rich men can access all the life's pleasures and are always surrounded by pretty girls, which is why he so badly wants to be one. We're left wondering why he chooses an unglamorous German girl to fall for (she won't even consider marrying him until she convinces herself he has some German ancestry and whether there was some particular point to this film - it wasn't funny enough to be escapist entertainment,and didn't really stimulate serious thought either.

Anne's rating 2.5/5
Ian's rating 2/5

Up and Down

Prague may be the trendiest city in eastern Europe, but after seeing "Up and Down" you might want to go to Belgrade or Warsaw instead. The Prague of "Up and Down" is a much nastier place than the nostalgic Prague of director, Jan Hrebejk’s previous films "Cosy Dens" and "Divided We Fall". The main theme this time is racial prejudice. The Czech’s fear the gipsies and both groups are fearful of the new immigrants from further east in Europe and from Asia. Tourists are there to be stolen from and Prague is divided into unofficial racial zones of control.
There is no plot or story in the traditional sense, rather a series of episodes featuring three sets of characters. A football hooligan and his infertile child-mad wife, a sick professor and his broken and far flung family and a gang of criminals. Each set has its own episodes and acts as bystanders in the other episodes.
Ironically Franta, the man who names his cat after his favourite soccer player and cannot adopt a child because of a conviction for hooliganism, is the most sympathetic character, mostly because of his intense loyalty (to his baby stealing wife, his football club, his mates and his job as a security guard). The professor is a more fickle character with a son in Australia, a bitter estranged wife and a younger lover and daughter at home. This leads to host of family secrets and conflicts, that drive most of their episodes. On the other hand we don’t really get to know the criminals as individuals, they just play their part.
Despite the nastiness, the confusing plot lines and host of characters this is a funny film, with lots of set pieces exploring immigration from the point of view of the "natives", the recent immigrants, the not so recent immigrants, those who have left and come back and those passing through.
Ian’s rating 4/5
Anne’s rating 3.5/5