2024-10-05 16:37:08
Viktor Tauš does not take anything easy. One of his most personal projects, Amerikánka, finally got its dream film form after more than two decades of thinking and processing in various formats.
The film, inspired by a girl the director met during his drug addiction, tells the story of a difficult fate in a children’s home during the previous regime. It is also the story of tens of thousands of children. And it is shot like nothing else in contemporary Czech cinematography.
Tauš’s projects, mainly television ones so far, often attack the boundaries of what the medium itself allows. His series Blue Shadows, Waterman and Traitors surprised the audience with a radical formal side, they were not afraid of expressive and symbolic work with colors or unusual photography. Often, the hand-held camera framed the image in such a way that the important thing happened somewhere on its edges.
Already in the crime drama “Aquarius” Viktor Tauš told about the clash of the world of adults with the dawning mind of teenage nieces. The world of Karel Jaromír Erben’s ballads alluded to the reality of the 80s, all in lyrical red-green “water” shades.
The director has now taken this effort to blend painful reality with an enormously stylized fantasy world to the extreme in Americana, which has been shown in cinemas since Thursday. The fate of the girl Emma in the middle of the normalizing “kid” is a purely emotional ride, a band of aesthetically – compositionally and colorfully – thought out scenes in detail. Catchy European pop hits such as Perdono or Non ho l’eta sound to it, the canvas is divided into several parts. Sometimes an unfastened hand-held camera wanders through the scenery, other times it is precisely centered compositions as in the meticulous films of directors Wes Anderson or Tarsem Singh. The difficult fate of the child heroines living in a sort of defended fantasy shield will remind you of Terry Gilliam’s Land of the Tide.
We could search for a long time for lists of similes, and it is certainly possible to analyze in detail the well-thought-out composition of scenes. They deliberately alternate quiet passages of sympathy and momentary safety with roaring, abuse, traumas from urination and the fact that the mother is everywhere and the boxer father – as a ghostly idyllized figure – lives far away in America.
In the movie American Girl, everything is extremely intense. | Photo: Bioscop
All emotions play to their maximum here, just as the sets remind of the aesthetics of the original theater project, the acting also seems tense as on stage. In fact, everything in Tauš’s film is extremely intense. As if the painful fate could not be captured in any other way than to shout it at the top of one’s lungs.
However, this is also a fundamental difficulty. With the help of David Jařab’s script and Jan Kadlec’s scenography, which often “installs” the characters in the middle of artistic artifacts, Tauš created a cinematographic work that is unparalleled in the Czech context. Like a mushroom, he devours all kinds of influences – from theater to surrealist imagery and logic to video clips, from neat idealized compositions to raw, albeit still strongly stylized scenes that attack the audience and threaten to knock him out.
Sometimes literally, as the heroine often punches directly into the camera. But this overload of senses and synapses sometimes seems to forget that strongly personal substances may not automatically work as strongly on others as on those who have experienced them.
Tauš transforms a children’s home into a kind of “punishment” colony from a dystopian world, the center of which is sand work. Fortunately, the idea has a special appeal and playfulness. The author certainly manages to work with children’s optics more inventively than many of his colleagues, including those whose films are currently playing in theaters. Beata Parkanová in Světýlky and likewise Bohdan Sláma in Konci světá rely on dysfunctional, nowadays rather clichéd lyrical views of swirling dust against the light with the help of colored glasses.
On the contrary, the American woman really tries to materialize what takes place inside a child. And what finally filters through the adult brain, in which, in addition to childhood traumas, various addictive substances circulate.
Although these circumstances partly justify an extremely intense, even manic aesthetic, formal equilibrism itself is quickly wanting. And the emotions that are constantly cranked up to the maximum can quickly turn into the opposite effect.
Similar to the film Requiem for a Doll by Filip Renč, a good intention – to depict a young mind suffering in an institution that does not exactly treat its charges in an ideal way – can give someone the impression that the creators are not using the theme too much.
The American dispels many of the potential criticisms with ingenuity, constantly offering new food for the eyes and ears, constantly reminding the audience how radically different she wants to be. At the same time, there are doubts as to how viable this postmodern aesthetic is today.
The protagonists inhabit old trains or spaces dominated by an unusually purple color, or they roll over piles of VHS tapes. The very fact that colors are supposed to tell and reflect different emotions is a bit of a survival.
When American director Todd Haynes, for example, uses similarly expressive methods, it makes sense because he revives or rather revitalizes the world of old Hollywood melodramas, to which a similar narrative position belongs. Viktor Tauš sometimes comes too close to a self-serving experimental manner.
The American heroine was portrayed by actresses Klára Kitto, Julie Šoucová (pictured) and Pavla Beretová. At the time of filming, they were nine, 17 and 38 years old. | Photo: Bioscop
“I’m a cliff, I’m a rock,” the American heroine whispers to herself in crisis situations. And Tauš manages to capture her special indomitability in some moments. But then comes a scene that borders on unbearable.
These cinematic surrealist maelstroms of ideas, emotions and imaginations are often fragile entities. They can easily excite, easily repulse. The American does not lack courage. But perhaps she lacks more fragility, so that the constant desire to shout everything to the world has the necessary counterpoint.
Film
American girl
Director: Viktor Tauš
Bioscop, in cinemas from September 26.