Jan Hřebejk says that for the first time in his career he made a pure comedy. The film State of Emergency, which has been shown in cinemas since Thursday, nevertheless raises the common question of what kind of genre it is. The story from a fictitious country with Ondřej Vetchý in the main role looks most of all as if it was filmed by someone who really does not like Czech Radio, paradoxically one of the main partners of the project.
Ondřej Vetchý plays the ace reporter Karel Beran, a foreign correspondent for Czech Radio in a kind of fictitious, predominantly Muslim country called Kambur. But from the beginning, State of Emergency has the effect that Prague, where most of the story takes place, is also fictitious – from the moment when Beran becomes jealous of his colleague and partner, because he sees her on the Internet in a few photos in the company of another man.
What will the renowned reporter – winner of the Golden Microphone Award – do on the day when there is an election in Kambur and his presence on the spot is enormously requested? Naturally, he goes back to Prague, where he keeps his partner, played by Tatiana Dyková, under “house arrest” in his apartment together with the supposed seducer. From there, with the help of pots, suitcases and appliances of all kinds, he begins to broadcast fake news from Kambur, where, in addition to the elections, the revolution also began.
Those very pathetic sentences, trying to parody journalism for clattering pots and bubbling water, strangely won over everyone from the listeners to the radio management and then almost the whole world. If we would like to try to understand where we have just found ourselves, in what world this collective hallucination is possible, the village of Zdeňka Trošky probably offers the closest analogy from domestic cinematography.
Just as Troška mistakenly believes that he is making nice rural films, while at the same time inhabiting worlds extremely distant from his reality only with undesirable, evil, impulsive individuals and caricatures of human beings, Jan Hřebejk and screenwriter Milan Tesař have moved so far away from any conceivable reality, that they can no longer be followed there. I guess they think they made a satire. But it would have to contain more than a small amount of reality to work.
In the Exceptional state, there are only characters that are not only impossible to connect with in any way, but above all, they all seem like the result of a bad joke.
Unfortunately, the characters seem like something from a bad joke. The picture shows Tatiana Dyková as Marta and Ondřej Vetchý as Karel Baran. | Photo: Jakub R. Špůr
It starts, of course, with Ondřej Vetchý. He is best at playing heroes with a grumpy character and a small perspective, then he is great, for example in the series Okresní přebor. As soon as he gets to play people who are really good at something, it usually stops being believable.
This time the situation is complicated, because his character Karel Beran is probably supposed to be a complete nomad. Luckily for him, he happens to be in a country that mistakenly resembles the Czech Republic, where similar Babrals can be stars of Czech Radio.
Individuals such as Bořek Slezáček continue to move in this country in the role of head of intelligence. He speaks seven world languages, he can quote famous Arab poets, but he is a cynic who cares about numbers, and then also the same fool as the others, because he does not reveal that Beren’s whole reporting odyssey from the stove is a sham.
Furthermore, for some unspecified reason – he is actually a neighbor, that must be enough – Jaroslav Plesl appears here, probably so that the creators can laugh at the teachers as well as the radio presenters. This cantor is a paranoid lunatic who, among other things, tries to carve an imaginary chip out of his stomach at home.
Otherwise, there is a lot of shouting, pot banging, Vetchý looking for the limits of his facial acting before exploding like a papyrus. And then the Arabs are sometimes insulted here, because one of them – originally from Kambur – happens to work in the Prague editorial office of Czech Radio.
Cinemas have been screening the movie State of Emergency since Thursday. | Video: Bio Illusion
It can be read from the official materials that it was supposed to be a satire about disinformation. Unfortunately, you can’t tell from the film itself. Rather, it looks like it was filmed by people similar to the ones it talks about. And their goal was to mock the world around them. And also to stir up base impulses.
The story was first staged at Prague’s Theater Na Fidlovačka, which is probably where part of the inappropriately overheated stylization in the style of “when there’s a lot of shouting, it’s a lot of fun” originates. But it can hardly justify the fact that the film really looks more like a Zdenek Troska production than Jan Hřebejk. And from the point of view of judgment, even as if it had been filmed by those who today are fashionable and not very happily called desolate.
State of emergency is a much worse phenomenon than most Czech mainstream “romantic” comedies. Their creators usually have zero ambition to say anything about the state of the world and just randomly pair up different characters.
Unfortunately, Hřebejk and Tesař are trying to tell the audience something under the noise of the kitchen junk. That message is about the same value as chain emails.
The state of emergency shows the world as a bizarre, villainous place where you can be an immoral monster and nothing much actually happens. A world that is better to sabotage than to participate in its running.
A good comedy usually wants to nudge a person with humor to sit back and think. Satire is supposed to be sharp and critical, but again with the aim of making a kind of social diagnosis. The state of emergency does not name anything. It brings more paralysis in its detachment from anything real.
Film
Exceptional condition
Director: Jan Hřebejk
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