2024-07-21 14:00:07
Abstinent alcoholic Michaela Duffková described her struggle with addiction first on a blog awarded by Magnesia Litera, then in several books. Now, based on her open description of the road to sobriety, a feature film was created with Teresa Ramba in the lead role.
The alcoholic’s notebook, which has been showing in cinemas since last Thursday, opens with perfectly lit shots of dewy bottles of prosecco, accompanied by sweet music. In essence, an advertisement promising an escape into the world of luxury and sensual pleasures. Naturally, it does not show that drinking alcohol also leads to a dulling of the senses and a loss of control. However, we see this right away when the advertising tinsel is torn off.
At a garden party, the heroine drinks more than her metabolism can handle and falls to the ground. He remains in a cheerful mood, but the faces of the others reveal horror and disgust. We later learn that the humiliating incident was a turning point in her life. So far it’s just a fragment without context.
After this premonition of a future fall, the narrative goes back in time. We recognize Michaela, the name of the protagonist played by Tereza Ramba, as a young woman in love, radiating energy. Her lips are painted with red lipstick. However, similarly rich colors, symbolizing desire and passion, begin to wane in her life when poisonous green prevails.
Red will continue to appear mainly in the heroine’s delirious visions. They create a refuge for her from the stressful reality. But the relief gradually becomes a trap with no escape.
For the general public
The alcoholic’s notebook reminds us from the first moments that Dan Svátek, signed for the films Damned or Smiles of Sad Men, is above all a director of spectacular pictures. It does not delve into great psychological depths. Although he chooses subjects inspired by reality, he usually does not strive for maximum realism. At the cost of schematizing characters and situations, he tells universal stories, the central idea of which can usually be summed up in a single quote. In the case of the Alcoholic Notebook, it could be the motto that Michaela Duffková had tattooed on herself – “Not everyone who wanders is lost”.
Tereza Ramba (right) with Michaela Duffková, the author of the model. | Photo: Nicola Šnajdrová
Even when looking into the interior of an anti-alcohol treatment center in Smiles of Sad Men, Svátek did not strive for the unpleasant naturalism offered, for example, by the Polish film The Guardian Angel from 2014. The Czech filmmaker turned Josef Formánek’s autobiographical work into a tragicomedy with funny figures and a clearly stated message, which despite all the excesses associated with extreme drinking, it looked relatively easy.
The Notebook of the Alcoholic is characterized by wide accessibility. Although the crew presented it at the Karlovy Vary festival, it is not a burdensome “art” film, but a melodrama betting on readable emotions and a timeless story about second chances, hope and the necessity of healthy relationships.
In the beginning there was trauma
At first it seems that Michaela does not miss such a relationship. Her partner Ondřej, played by Miloslav König, is patient and supportive. They have just moved into his parents’ country house and are expecting a child. However, the heroine has a disturbed relationship with herself. He needs a lot of reassurance from the outside. But she doesn’t get that. The man is always at work, and the expectant mother mainly hears unsolicited advice or comments from the mother-in-law, which ends in arguments and theatrical escapes from home.
The film pays so little attention to the deeper causes of the protagonist’s frailty in its focus on the outside, that it seems that her pushy mother-in-law was the trigger for her alcoholism. Only one short flashback indicates that the heroine grew up in a household full of shouting. She deals with childhood trauma, at least indirectly, by overcoming the communication barrier between her and her father, also an alcoholic.
The social dimension of addiction interests the authors as little as the psychological one. We do not learn, for example, what exactly Michaela does for a living or what kind of education she achieved. In any case, there is no indication that she – unlike thousands of other dependent women – was at risk of poverty due to the constant replenishment of liquid supplies. On the other hand, she and Ondřej moved from the countryside to a multi-room apartment in the center of Prague.
The Notebook of an Alcoholic is more convincing in showing the consequences of drinking than in searching for the causes. The central actress, who spends most of her time at home with her child, at first just sips wine from a mug with a broken ear. As a reminder of her gradually fading innocence, she hugs the teddy bear that Ondřej shot at her on the pilgrimage at the beginning.
The disintegration of the personality is not only manifested in primary symbols. Michaela is increasingly bumping into things, tripping, falling, even in the literal sense. He pours the alcohol into a juice bottle and hides it. He hides some facts, forgets others. For example, turn off the gas stove on which he cooks dinner. The more addicted she is, the more dangerous she is to herself and her daughter.
The 90-minute film does not contain many calmer scenes that show the characters and their environment. The first hour or so consists of a chain of typical events from life under the influence. They are generally believable on their own, but with similar high concentration, they cannot resonate as well as when the original author wrote them in the form of blog posts published at longer intervals.
Some situations are repeated. Promises and lies. Conflict and reconciliation. Cycling instead of development. The spiral structure faithfully reflects the hopelessness of an addicted person, who gets back on his feet for a while, only to fall to the bottom again. And then again, until complete collapse.
Thanks to the performance of Tereza Rambo (pictured), the film The Alcoholic Notebook can be forgiven for many dramaturgical lapses or stylistic unmooring. | Photo: Nicola Šnajdrová
Physical transformation
The plot shift is not significant at first, and the biggest transformation again takes place on the surface, on the body of Teresa Rambo. The initial joy disappears from the heroine’s increasingly swollen face. With greasy hair, he looks unkempt in a pulled-up sweater. The courage of the thirty-five-year-old actress is also shown by the fact that she is not afraid to be repulsive in front of the camera. She thus breaks the tradition of Hollywood films about alcoholic women such as When a Man Loves a Woman or 28 Days, where her American colleagues Meg Ryan and Sandra Bullock remain beautiful regardless of their blood alcohol level.
When the camera at one point captures the naked heroine in the bath, then without sexual connotation, purely so that we can see how the hematomas and dark spots increase on Michaela’s body. On the other hand, the ability to mask the manifestations of alcoholism with make-up and nice clothes is the reason why others overlook that something is wrong for a long time. The protagonist hears the compliment “it suits you” from different men a total of three times.
Tereza Ramba does not play her alcoholic as a pitiful victim of fate, as a fatalistic narrative, directed from the beginning to a well-known point, could lead to. It has a vulnerability in it, but it can attack. Sometimes she is unfair and hurts others. He defends himself against helplessness with harsh humor. When the doctor informs her that she has consumed a near-fatal amount of alcohol, she sarcastically quips, “I’m just fine.”
In a muted self-deprecating position, Tereza Rambo can surprise more than when Marta Ferencová’s script asks her to scream hysterically at someone. She has done this in a lot of earlier movies and serials. If the heroine’s disappearance is unable to “play out” to a similarly suggestive extreme as, for example, Emília Vášáryová, who became an empty box in the Slovak drama Eva Nová, it is due more to the scattered direction than to a lack of acting talent.
The narrative, cut into short, unrelated scenes, creates a strong but fleeting impression. It does not progress to increasingly intense manifestations of addiction. Also, the style is sometimes naturalistic, other times it unironically returns to advertising aesthetics with slow-motion images and English songs. All the subjective shots are of little use, a remnant of the original concept, according to which the entire film should have been shot in this way. Even if the interruptions were supposed to reflect that a drunken person perceives causality in a disturbed way, the film fails to draw in the result.
The effort to transfer as many of Michaela Duffková’s experiences as possible to the screen and fit them into the template of a typical “success story”, i.e. a story about great success, takes on absurd parameters in the final third. In contrast to the stillness of the previous minutes, an awful lot happens in a short time. New relationship, breakup, reconciliation, suicide and self-actualization. The creators condense the treatment process into a short stay at a detoxification unit and several group sessions.
However, it is still necessary to bear in mind the anchoring of the genre and the fact that realism is not as authoritative for the director as telling a moving, inspiring story about regaining independence. And as spreading enlightenment. In parallel with the release of The Notebook in cinemas, the Women with Courage campaign was launched targeting those who resort to risky drinking. In recent years, there has been an alarming increase in the number of them in the Czech Republic. If we approach the film from this position, it can be forgiven for many dramaturgical lapses and stylistic looseness.
An alcoholic’s notebook tells an inspiring story about regaining independence. The picture shows Alžběta Malá as Eva and Tereza Ramba in the role of Michaela. | Photo: Nicola Šnajdrová
As the main intention, we can perceive not psychological drawing and connection to the heroine, but education. The individual episodes don’t add up to a coherent whole, but they form a useful catalog of phenomena that contribute to the fact that we, as a society, are overly lenient with one of the most readily available drugs: a colleague persuading Michaela to go out for a drink with them, supermarkets offering bottles of sparkling wine on sale, surprise when no one drinks at a party, and so on.
If you take a moment to think about what is being sold to you so obviously the next time you watch an alcohol ad, then Dan Svátek’s film, despite all its flaws, served at least one purpose. Finally, perhaps the most important.
Film
Notebook of an alcoholic
Directed by: Dan Svátek
Bontonfilm, in theaters from August 11.