2024-07-08 02:52:38
The pig snorts in the sty, the guys in the yard look almost religiously at the approaching car. Appropriately pompous, militantly religious music sounds like a king or a pope about to arrive. In the opening of the new Czech film Mord, which is currently being screened at the Karlovy Vary festival, an essential person indeed approaches the cottage: the butcher.
The expected feature debut of screenwriter and director Adam Martinec works not only with the tradition of the female killer, but also echoes of old Czech bittersweet comedies.
Thirty-four-year-old Martinec, a native of Krnov, was already considered a unique phenomenon at Prague’s FAMU since his short film Sugar and Salt from 2018. The film, in which a sit-down with a beer and a roast turned into a melancholic boy’s contemplation of old age and mortality, relied on non-actors, comedic timing, capturing an authentic setting. Rather than current trends, Martinec followed the tradition of the Czechoslovak new wave or Jaroslav Papoušek’s comedy. He continues this with the film Mord, which the Karlovy Vary festival is now presenting in the main competition.
Martinec once again entrusted the role of the four-generation staff of the cottage, where the 150-kilogram pimp Ferda is soon to be slaughtered, mostly to non-actors, perhaps with the exception of Albert Čuba. While the focus of the plot of Sugar and Salt was the absence of a butcher to “peck” the lamb, this time the butcher is present. But he’s short of dry rounds for the stun gun. And that could be a problem, as it sounds in the story about the badly hit pig that broke both of the butcher’s legs. Mord is full of similar speeches and believable, casually uttered tales.
This time, however, Zabijačka – similar to Tomáš Pavlíček’s comedy Cottage for sale – primarily represents a way to fit a large number of characters into a small space and present various partner, family and neighborhood frictions.
How to maintain a family
Despite the jokes, Martinec creates a bitter, sad atmosphere when, under the pressure of the situation and the increasing amount of alcohol, the long-standing partnership conflict comes to the surface. And again, the director is strong not only in the natural management of non-actors, but also in how to break down certain stereotypes.
Mord can easily become a popular village comedy. | Photo: CinemArt
The killer in the film is not a celebration of dying traditions, on the contrary, it is a problematic matter not only for the grumpy old neighbor who wants to betray the actors, but actually also for the grandmother and grandfather, for whom the shack was more of a burden. And this is supposed to be the last chun to be slaughtered.
In a similar way, Martinec can portray, for example, the character of a vegetarian policeman who has had a stomach ache from food and breakfast since childhood and cannot eat it without it being a joke or a caricature.
Mord may not seem to have much more to say on the feature screen than Martinc’s short films. Again, it tells about the fragility and insecurities behind strong boyish gestures. This time, however, he also draws women into the male collective and touches, for example, on how old village hierarchies are changing.
The issue is not whether pig slaughter can be maintained despite European Union regulations. There’s nothing to do when Grandpa Karel slips with a bucket of blood – and the existence of the intestines is fundamentally threatened. Mord is more about how to keep a family together, how to break out of decades or generations of roles and habits. At these moments, the film occasionally slips into predictable patterns, but that can also be its strength.
Martinec actually wants to reconcile the generations, not only of his heroes, but also of the audience. Mord can easily become a popular village comedy, which is enthusiastically applauded by the audience of the Great Hall of the Karlovy Vary Hotel Thermal. And he says that being nostalgic, bittersweet and conciliatory doesn’t always have to be bad – despite the tradition of domestic filmmaking. That it is possible to be popular and at the same time not pander to the most average taste.
In the picture from Mord, the director’s father Karel Martinec is in the role of Karl. | Photo: CinemArt
The danger of fascism
While Mord benefits from naturalness and unforcedness, the other film in competition – the Slovakian-Czech drama Ema a smrtihlav – lacks precisely these qualities. At the same time, the director Iveta Grófová, in her previous work The Fifth Ship, successfully presented at the Berlinale festival, was also able to benefit from unobtrusive work with child actors and oscillate on the edge between social drama and lyrical adventure.
But the new Ema a smrtihlav is a period drama from the Slovak countryside of the early 1940s, when fascism is growing stronger and Andrej Hlinka’s guards are coming to the border to strengthen “Slovak blood” in this corner of the country inhabited by Hungarians.
Actress Alexandra Borbély is on the picture from Emma and the Death’s Head. | Photo: Pilot Film
The difficult theme of the film based on the book by Peter Krištúfek, co-author of the screenplay, seems to be reflected in the director’s manuscript as well. The drama about a seamstress dismissed from a tailor’s shop in Bratislava because of her Hungarian origin and surviving in a village where social tension is growing, wants to tell about a difficult time when people had to face complex moral questions. The widowed heroine hides a Jewish boy in the stable, and for this she has to resist the pressure of one of the guards and the proposals of the German Nazi captain.
Like Grófová’s previous work, the film at times shows the world through a child’s lens, seen only through the narrow windows of the wooden building where she survives on hay among pigs and other animals. And he tries for a non-black-and-white view, when he portrays even the captain of the Hlinka Guard as a contradictory man under pressure. Everyone here operates in a limited space, either literally or figuratively.
But at the same time, it is an overly literal, overloaded work, into which close-up shots of the death’s head larva enter with regularity, but no longer with excessive elegance. This symbolism seems somewhat cautious. And the fact that four different languages are spoken constantly, often very haphazardly, does not add to the film’s authenticity. Rather, it is another element that alienates the film from the audience.
Ema a smrtihlav certainly wants to be a topical contribution to the debate about the dangers of fascism, but it does not go too far beyond this warning framework.