2024-09-26 05:49:58
Tonda is unlucky. While his older brother goes to Paris with his parents for three weeks, the sick boy has to stay at home with his grandfather. It is the end of August 1968 and the invasion of Soviet tanks prolongs the trip indefinitely.
Director Bohdan Sláma looks at the countryside with completely different eyes than in his earlier socially attuned work in the film Konec světa, which is now showing in cinemas. He made his most welcoming and at the same time most problematic film.
The 57-year-old holder of the Czech Lions for Štěstí or Babu z ledu always looked at the village with a mixture of realism and a strange idealization or typification. The protagonists of Wild Bees or Four Suns were often poor, ordinary people. But there seems to be something romantic about their poverty.
In the news, Tonda and her grandfather find themselves in a village in the Jizera Mountains, which no longer has much to do with reality. Which is a strange paradox, especially since The End of the World wants to tell about very real things: the moving circumstances of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
The effort to capture harsh periods of history through children’s eyes, when adults help to survive harsh reality with the help of small lies, certainly has many precedents. One can recall, for example, Roberto Benigni’s sentimental film Life is Beautiful from 1997. Although the work was often on the edge or beyond the edge of kitsch, at least it was coherent and comprehensible. Slám’s novel is just a sequence of not very compact scenes and scenes that seem primarily as if Ivan Arsenyev’s script had been gutted and any connections or at least tonal coherence had disappeared.
The village, which the creator has inhabited this time with a set of special figurines, no longer resembles a real village at all. Only extremely typical people live here, such as a communist innkeeper, his unhappy wife, Tond’s grandfather played by Miroslav Krobot as a fierce descendant of Russian nobles, a flamboyant German or the proud owner of a Trabant, Michal Isteník. And then there are two boys who are killing time with cloven hooves. They are the only ones who can sometimes recreate the atmosphere of children’s films in the spirit of Marie Poledňáková. Even if only for a short, isolated moment.
Two boys are killing time with cloven hooves. The picture shows Josef Slavík as Honza and Vojtěch Veverka in the role of Tonda. | Photo: Zuzana Panská
Adults and their actions seem to belong in different corners of domestic cinematography. Here we are for a moment in the benign world of Zdenek and Jan Svěrák, and at other times in a hostile caricature of the village, almost as if by Zdenek Troška.
With this “adventurous” stay in various stylizations, even Diviš Marko’s camera seemed to have no idea what to do. He often frames the picture with smooth slow motions that last so long that you almost finish making your coffee before it’s over. But then suddenly, in a few more action-packed scenes, he jumps to manual shooting, which starts as suddenly as it ends. And it doesn’t have the intended effect of getting closer to the heroes at all.
This is the general problem with the whole film: there are no protagonists whose actions we understand. The central dilemma rests on the shoulders of grandfather Krobot, who has not gotten along with his brother and therefore refuses to go with Tonda to join him and the rest of the family in Paris. Despite apparently being the boy’s last chance to live a better life. However, this dilemma is only flashed occasionally, while the film returns to boyhood adventures – on a tree or a lookout tower. For most of the time, the heroes are sitting somewhere and chatting: children on a tree or the observation deck, adults in the garden, in a cottage or a pub.
The band at the core of the sceneless scenes has an endless impression, sometimes there is a dramaturgically unprepared excitement: the boys do not return home because someone locked their watchtower, a drunken innkeeper attacks his grandfather because he is jealous, Soviet soldiers decide to confiscate someone’s property. However, they are only chaotic reminders that something is happening in the film, that it does not take place in timelessness.
Sometimes, probably due to cutting or shortening, the events do not make sense at all, or resemble an unintentional transfer to one of Cimrman’s plays.
Miroslav Krobot as Grandpa. | Photo: Zuzana Panská
For example, the characters are walking through the woods, apparently looking for a lost boy for hours, and suddenly one of the neighbors pulls a photo out of his pocket at two in the morning in the middle of a dark forest and says something like, “I found this photo in the attic, isn’t that a relative of yours?” It should probably be a reminder that the various inhabitants of the film’s setting have a dark family past, either Nazi or Communist. But the effect of such moments is rather purely comical.
Sláma is able to cast actors with expressive faces in minor roles and for a moment he manages to create the impression of a village somewhere in the Jizerské hory, where tough people live, sufficiently tested by life. Even such moments seem too lyrical, but there is something from the author’s older films. Unfortunately, in the next scene, we usually get into a completely different plane and mood.
In general, Czech filmmakers are not very successful in making a functional film populated by a whole constellation of characters – as American independent films often manage, for example. Petr Jarchovský’s screenplays for Jan Hřebejk and some of Slám’s older projects have problems with this. But it’s not impossible, currently debutant Adam Martinac managed to create the impression of a living Czech village in the film Mord.
On the other hand, this time Sláma was completely drowned in what stylization he wanted to choose, whether it should be a historical drama, a children’s or a family film, whether he wanted to show the benign face of the countryside or the caricaturally angry one. In the scrum, the central theme also completely disappears: the complicated relationship between grandfather and grandson.
The annotation draws attention to how the educated and artistically oriented grandfather tries to prepare the boy for difficult times, how he tries to teach him French or how to eat well. This is the content of one single scene, when the boy gets two sentences spoken in French.
We won’t reveal the final plot twist, let’s just point out that the viewer gasps at first. And further, one can only observe how the potentially supporting theme of the grandfather’s ethically problematic behavior is swept under the carpet by this ending. Spectators can then only watch a moment of typically Czech reconciliation. The end of the world is a film set in a crucial, turning point in history, and it sufficiently emphasizes how evil the “Russians” are. But in the end, he just waves his hand over the history and his characters anyway.
Film
The end of the world
Director: Bohdan Sláma
CinemArt, in theaters from September 19.