2024-03-07 20:02:33
Cinemas started showing two films this week that couldn’t possibly be more different. Nevertheless, they have one thing in common: the monumental Hollywood sci-fi Dune 2 and the Czech crime drama Manžela Stodola will be uncomfortable, even painful, for viewers to watch. That’s why both titles are great.
A man with a stocking on his head appears like a ghost in the flimsy yellowish light of the street lamp. Then he puts on his hood and heads to the old family house. But what follows is not the harsh murder that true crime genre connoisseurs would expect. A man walks into a darkened room – and we find that he is back home. “Weren’t you there?” asks the wife. “I…can I go there tomorrow?” the failed criminal answers. An awkwardness and stuffiness spreads around the room.
The film Husband and Wife tells the story of a couple of serial killers who robbed and murdered eight senior citizens in 2001 and 2002. Director Petr Hátle chooses a rather radical method in his first feature film. It starts literally in the middle of the “action” and follows the protagonists through the eyes of a non-participating observer. He does not add what preceded the actions, he does not psychologize, he deduces everything from what is happening “here and now”. The result is one of the most remarkable debuts and Czech films in a very long time.
Hátle takes advantage of the fact that he started out as a documentary filmmaker. And also his penchant for observing people on the fringes of society, which he already showed in the film Big Night from 2014. At that time, he lived among the “inhabitants” of non-stop bars, game rooms, clubs and clubs, among peculiar existences that live mainly after dusk.
He followed the heroes struggling with drug addiction and other social problems without moralizing, but at the same time, his graduation film at FAMU and the winning documentary of the Jihlava festival had such a strong aesthetic quality, artistic side and admittedly staged passages that it resembled a staged work. And he raised doubts as to whether he is no longer approaching mannerism and whether he is not aestheticizing misery.
Now the filmmaker has gone in the opposite direction. The Stodol couple are reminiscent of a documentary with their thriftiness. Jan Hájek and Lucie Žáčková in the roles of Jaroslav and Dana Stodolová were given the difficult task of portraying two real people who committed extreme crimes but, unlike many serial killers, did not kill out of some psychiatrically definable urge. Rather out of desperation.
The film does not show evil as something extreme. The picture shows Jan Hájek and Lucie Žáčková as Stodol. | Photo: CinemArt
Foreign true crime films and series, which are so popular today, often deal with the widest possible context. They look into the past, reveal the personalities of criminals. He tries as intensively as possible to show the horror of the acts, but on the other hand to uncover what was behind them.
Petr Hátle consistently avoids capturing violence and murder. On the contrary, it follows the protagonists even more closely before and after the act. It does not show evil as something extreme, it follows only two afflicted individuals who literally survive from day to day due to bad social habits and a miserable background.
Their first murder is actually just the result of a botched robbery. Others are packed in quick succession, instinctively, without much excitement. We feel a certain emotional and moral numbness, but not such that we perceive the protagonists as perverted individuals.
Hátle glosses over any “mitigating” circumstances. What we don’t learn from the film is that Dana worked as a prostitute in America, that she was raped and that the trauma led her to abuse drugs. Or that Jaroslav had an alcoholic father who beat him and that he went to a special school.
Nevertheless, the film manages to build remarkably non-black-and-white characters, battered by life, who act almost instinctively, but at the same time do not ask for our empathy.
Cinemas are screening the film Husbands and Stodols from this Thursday. | Video: CinemArt
Dana looks like a calculating bitch who is looking out for her own benefit, Jaroslav is an indecisive dork who probably likes her enough and doesn’t notice how the woman manipulates him.
There is something sweaty, uncomfortable, yet authentic in their coexistence, which complicates the described, model-like characteristics of both, but which is relatively difficult to write about, because it radiates from the captivating, nuanced performances of Hájek and Žáčeková. In a long time, there have not been such unpleasant protagonists in Czech cinema.
Manžela Stodol’s film speaks of evil as something stuck and so down-to-earth that it can hardly become an object of fascination, which serial murders are often turned into by other filmmakers.
It’s a film that doesn’t shock us and doesn’t make us look away, if only because it practically doesn’t show the murders themselves, even though in the carefully staged dramaturgy they end up having their small but significant place directly on the screen. Hátle only concentrates minute by minute the life of both protagonists as a tedious survival, which is nothing romantic, but also cannot be condemned or written off with one simple sentence about the manipulation or abuse of the trusting Jaroslav by the calculating Dana. Rather, it captures life in a trap. Unbeknownst to them, they are both caught in it.
Husband and wife Stodol form a thrifty, dirty counterpoint to the opulent true crime from Netflix and other online platforms, which leave the audience exhausted and wringing out emotional and drastic roller coasters after watching.
Hátle’s film is similarly settled and indulgent as his actors. He is not afraid of dirt, on the contrary, but he does not need to roll the audience in the mud.
It captures a somewhat twisted relationship, but the only shocking thing about it is how ordinary it actually is, how it reeks of a cheap hostel or sublet, bottles of schnapps and prescription pills. As in the limited optics of the Stodolovs, there is a very small difference between robbing a locker at work and murdering a neighbor for a few tens of thousands. Not because the protagonists are sociopaths or psychopaths. They are just people with a limited perspective, whether due to social conditions, intellectual outlook, or a combination of a number of overlapping factors.
The film does not shock and does not make us look away. The picture shows Jan Hájek and Lucie Žáčková as Stodol. | Photo: CinemArt
Petr Hátle has made a film that – although it is not his primary goal – captures the poverty of life on the fringes of society better than most Czech social dramas.
It would be applauded if the film didn’t rather make you want to put your head in your hands, take a deep breath and try to shake it off.
Film
Husband and wife Stodol
Director: Petr Hátle
CinemArt, in theaters from February 29.