2024-08-19 04:58:36
For the third time, the popular Czech actor Jiří Mádl is playing the role of film director. In Waves, which cinemas are starting to screen this Thursday after its premiere at the Karlovy Vary festival, uses sweeping strokes to paint portraits of reform communists who already defended Czechoslovak Radio in August 1968.
The long-awaited historical thriller begins with a montage of archival footage. Josif Vissarionovič Stalin, Milada Horáková and other emblems of totality. Twenty years of history in thirty seconds. An off-screen voice speaks of millions of ruined lives. The text of the comment also appears in the image. Similar to short videos from Instagram, Facebook or TikTok. From the prologue it is already clear that Jiří Mádl approaches history more in the style of social networks than in the style of historians.
The 37-year-old director does not even hide that Vlnami wanted to reach a younger audience. In addition to effective abbreviations and passwords, the age of the protagonist also meets this. Vojtěch Vodochodský plays the budding radio technician Tomáš, inspired by several real-life role models. After the death of his parents, he alone takes care of his sixteen-year-old brother Pavle. But while he is preparing dinner for him in the beginning of the film, the sibling marches with hundreds of other students in Prague against the cordon of members of the Public Security and shouts “We want light!”.
The strongly suppressed protest due to power outages in Strahov’s dormitories from October 1967 is filmed with such intensity that it immediately draws you into the plot. In addition, it brings up one of the many themes between which the film will fly. While Tomas toasts in the pan, he calls more informed acquaintances to find out why Pavel is not home yet. Concern for his rebellious brother remains his motivation for much of the next 130 minutes.
Tomáš also joins the foreign editorial office of Czechoslovak Radio mainly to support Pavel. Otherwise, there would be a risk that his strict companion from the social worker would deprive him of custody. In the work team led by the charismatic Milan Weiner, played by Stanislav Majer, the hard-working technician finds not only a living but also new friends. After overcoming the initial antipathies, she begins to understand the editor Věra Šťovíčková, already embodied by Táňa Pauhofová.
Heroes like from the poster
The Strahov demonstration was brutally dispersed by members of the Public Security, but the communist press agency reports on the alleged aggressiveness of the students. However, there is an audio recording proving that men with batons were to blame. StB members start looking for her.
Vojtěch Vodochodský plays Tomáš, a novice radio technician. | Photo: Dawson Films
Similar material beckons Milan Weiner, who, to the displeasure of the radio director, tries to broadcast verified news. The same ethical principles are respected by his colleagues Jiří Dienstbier, Jan Petránek and Luboš Dobrovský. Everyone in the film represents the poster heroes, the idols of their time, whom we have no doubt will always behave properly.
We do not see into the privacy of the editors. Weiner’s wife appears on camera briefly, as a ghost. Our sympathies are gained by the news reporters with their liberal thinking and cosmopolitanism. They speak many world languages and know foreign culture and cuisine. When Tomáš first comes to the newsroom, his future colleagues are listening to the hit Be My Baby by the American pop trio The Ronettes.
But the reality is more complicated. Weiner was a communist, though later a reformist, and along with other journalists from the official media initially helped legitimize one-party rule in the late 1940s and early 1950s. For example, when he worked as a Red Right correspondent in Beijing, he organized a meeting with Mao Zedong at the Czechoslovak embassy. Nevertheless, the film does not complicate the romantic portraits of “radio speakers” with similar nuances. Nor does it reflect Weiner’s Jewish origin – it was because of him that this Terezin and Auschwitz survivor was recalled from Beijing as an inconvenient person.
The waves unequivocally glorify radio workers, while socialite-type characters sound like unimaginative caricatures. In this respect, the film, with all its striving for worldliness, represents rather a return to the naive black-and-white interpretation of history that prevailed in Czech cinematography in the 1990s and 2000s. Except for the brief period of the Prague Spring, when the shots look brighter and more colorful, socialist Czechoslovakia is, in Jiří Mádl’s eyes, a dark and dangerous place that does not allow for everyday existence.
The regime makes itself known primarily through violence and bullying of citizens. Public Security officers cut down socialist youth so headlong that the camera shakes. The shadows of the ever-present StB agents creep through nighttime Prague, and sometimes they scream and burst into the radio station building and start destroying the equipment. And the Soviet soldiers resemble a bunch of mindless barbarian raiders.
Between the two extremes stands Tomáš, the only figure with multiple shades. Because of brotherly love, he becomes easily manipulated. An ideal object for StB. Jiří Mádl’s script, however, apart from one dilemma and many platitudes, did not equip him with greater psychological depth, let alone ambiguity. When, at the end of the film, he abandons the principle that has governed all his actions until now, it feels like a forced shortcut, not the culmination of a gradual transformation. In short, waves are more Hollywood than cinema of moral unrest, as the current of Polish cinema from the late 1970s was called.
Táňa Pauhofová as Věra Šťovíčková and Vojtěch Vodochodský in the role of Tomáš. | Photo: Dawson Films
Dive into the archives
The problem with the film is not that it simplifies history into a struggle between “the cultured European world and the primitive Russian one”, to quote the director, but that it does not do so consistently enough to meet the demands of the genre. The truly compelling American true-event thrillers that Mádl cites as a model, such as 2012’s Argo, manage to disguise their narrative construction. The one in Vlny sticks out distractingly into the space.
It’s not just Tomáš’s sudden transformation and glaring schematism, but also the clumsiness with which the script weaves together a number of storylines. The first hour and a half seems like a discontinuous band of Czechoslovak events from 1967 and 1968, interspersed with hits by Helena Vondráčková or the Ulrych siblings. Tomáš and Věra are going to Slovakia for a report on forged letters, StB is looking for the Strahov recording, students are printing leaflets with Alexander Dubček, President Antonín Novotný is covering up his son’s misdeeds and so on.
However, no theme or motif is exclusive enough to drive the narrative. Every now and then, the film pays attention to another character, the goals and sources of conflicts change, and it is not clear whether we are following the story of two brothers, one love affair, Milan Weiner, or the entire foreign newsroom. Mádl’s honest dive into the archives leads to the chronicling of chapters from the history of radio journalism.
Due to the period setting, the viewer waits for the Soviet tanks to arrive. But in the end, this sounds like a more or less autonomous addition, not a logical outcome of previous motifs and relationships, as, for example, in Pelíšče by Jan Hřebejk. Despite the dynamic soundtrack by the Welsh composer Simon Goff, the urgent camerawork by Martin Žiaran and the bravura interweaving of live passages with archival ones, one cannot get rid of the feeling that the evocative reconstruction of August 1968 could be a separate film.
Even about archetypal figures, the heroic effort to defend free broadcasting does not reveal anything new. It just repeats long and loud what we already know.
The finale is thrilling, but also disproportionately long due to the pursuit of fidelity. For the same reason, one key character drops out of the narrative before the end. Yes, that’s roughly how it actually happened, but if the film flattens historical facts in other ways, why doesn’t it also do so where it would benefit its flow?
Instead, historical truth sometimes takes precedence, sometimes dramatic effect and stylized shots in which the actors resemble lonely figures from Edward Hopper’s canvases. Both approaches interfere with each other, and in the end the film is neither authentic nor predatory enough.
Waves is Jiří Mádl’s third film. Sitting at the table are Táňa Pauhofová as Věra Šťovíčková, Stanislav Majer in the role of Milan Weiner and Vojtěch Vodochodský as Tomáš. | Photo: Dawson Films
Nevertheless, the Waves look and sound several orders of magnitude better than Mádl’s previous projects Pojedeme k morí and Na stéše. Costumes, sets, big mustaches and the sound of a dialing telephone – everything faithfully evokes the 60s and makes it easier for the audience to experience the dramatic situations faced by the heroes.
It seems that the intention to which Jiří Mádl subordinated the smoothness and fluidity of the narrative, as well as the choice of stylistic devices, was to evoke strong emotions. And he succeeds. Although too often he helps himself with literal musical dramaturgy or disproportionate formal aggravation, when even the arrival of the presidential motorcade at the Castle is underlined by throbbing music as if from a Christopher Nolan action blockbuster.
Even thanks to this exaggeration, the last half hour will probably make such a powerful impression on many viewers that they will forget the occasional cheesiness and frequent clichés of the previous minutes. In the end, they will take away from the cinema mainly an emotional message about the courage of several men and women.
Enthusiastic reactions from the premiere at the Karlovy Vary festival and regional screenings indicate that there is a demand for a similarly straightforward assurance of the heroism and fighting spirit of the Czech nation. Probably bigger than after movies that don’t create myths, but destroy them.
Film
Waves
Screenplay and direction: Jiří Mádl
Bontonfilm, in theaters from August 15.