2024-08-28 14:05:30
A party in the Slovak mountains has everything that embodies rapid success in the hectic 90s of the last century. Booze, naked women, singing folk songs. And also the way mobsters dealt with problems back then.
“Do you know who I am?” asks Capo Mikuláš Černak of the thief fiercely focused on stealing the lights from his car. In the opening scene of the film Miki, the “ungodly” is then dragged behind a car like in the Wild West.
The Slovakian-Czech drama, which has been showing cinemas since Thursday, portrays the first stage of the “career” of the now 57-year-old mafia boss, a figure as infamous in our eastern neighbors as the similarly aged Radovan Krejčíř.
The former bus driver Mikuláš Černák was looking for every way to improve himself from the beginning of the 90s. Unlike his hot-tempered brother, he patiently endured the scorn of his German employers on the logging brigade and waited for an opportunity. Soon he already owned two buses and started an entrepreneurial career.
He soon bought several trucks – and that had a little less to do with the regular business. The papers for the transaction were signed by a man who appeared to be seeing a pen for the first time in his life, and the vehicles soon disappeared, as did the planted “companion”.
The charismatic Černák known as Miki knew how to be in the right place at the right time. He is now serving a life sentence for six murders in the prison in Leopoldov, in 2019 he admitted that he took the lives of 16 people after the revolution. He recently applied for parole after 25 years behind bars. The meeting was postponed indefinitely.
Milan Ondrík plays Miki in such a way that it is not difficult to easily romanticize him, despite the enormity of his actions. | Photo: Joseph Marcinský
Talented screenwriter Miro Šifra, who is behind many works dealing with painful periods of Czech and Slovak history – for example the miniseries Rédl – spent tens of hours with him in prison. With a necessary critical eye, she looked precisely at the wild period of the 90s as a time not only joyful, but also a difficult transformation of old structures into new ones. With emphasis on the fact that many of the old ones were stuck in the nascent democracy.
Miki processes the first half of the 90s through a different genre filter. Although the creators drew on the research and memories of Černák himself, director Jakub Kroner was also strongly inspired by cinema’s most famous mafia sagas.
An atmospheric drama modeled on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather or Martin Scorsese’s Mobsters, it deals with the importance of family and deals with peculiar gangster morality, in which, although it does not affect the family and things must be resolved fairly “between men”, this worldview easily fits into constant infidelity and daily stay in the presence of half-naked companions. Both images are referred to several times here, either through certain montage sequences or by emphasizing the repetition of certain phenomena, especially funerals.
Miki does not want to be a defense of Černák’s actions, the filmmakers are strongly opposed to that. On the contrary, especially in today’s socio-politically unhappy times, they point to the need to show the dark places of history so that society can learn from them. And rather than moralizing, it’s certainly better to shoot pictures that try to observe, to give some context.
But casting the charismatic Milan Ondrík in the title role already sounds problematic in its own way. The 44-year-old actor, known from the film Veteran or Eva Nová, is almost two decades older than Černák in the early 1990s. And his sad, unreadable gaze can be a projection screen for anything.
Milan Ondrík (right) will also portray Miki in the upcoming second part. | Photo: Joseph Marcinský
The film briefly sketches a view of a man who at first wanted to stick to certain rules and just take care of his family, whatever that means. Circumstances – namely mainly the imprudent actions of those around him – however, started a cycle of events in which problems could no longer be solved with fat envelopes.
In short, it is not difficult to easily romanticize this hero, despite the enormity of his actions and the sometimes comical clumsiness of Slovak crooks who learn their “craft” as they go. But this quite faithfully describes the nature of the time when anyone could be anything, determination or downright audacity was enough.
For a while, it seems that Miro Šifra took away from prison mainly stories that could be filmed nicely, about how Černák arrived home after a wild moment of love in the back seats of his car in women’s panties. Or how Miki bought his brother a Bavarian, the kind of which perhaps only Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar has in Slovakia at the time.
But in the end, it is precisely this mixture of comic uproar and an overall rather sad tone that forms the strongest part of the film, which otherwise only acts as a prologue. That’s it anyway, the drama ends in the middle. The sequel, Černák, in which the crimes will have a significantly more political dimension, will be released early next year.
For the time being, the theme of the family is particularly noteworthy in the sometimes too abbreviated narrative. Some moments may seem borrowed from famous film opuses, but at the same time they have a believable local basis. With some scenes from the more than thirty-year-old past, one can easily recall, for example, current Slovak documentaries about guest workers who commute across the border because there is no future waiting for them in the local “jezedé”. Today, the “Jednotné zemědělský družstva” is a private enterprise with a different name, but many things remain similarly bleak in the village.
That’s why it’s good that Neighbors produced a film that doesn’t want to talk about the bizarre figures and ghosts of the 90s only as a relic of a specific historical period. Miki Černák presents a character that can be understood. And thus to think about where the spiral begins, which ends with corpses buried in the woods. And also about how the past still leaves its mark on today.
Film
Miki
Director: Jakub Kroner
CinemArt, Czech premiere on August 22.