2024-02-29 15:55:50
Adam Sandler appeared in an unusually serious role at the Berlinale festival. The American actor famous for his comedies played astronaut Jakub Procházka in the new sci-fi film Kosmonaut z Čech, who is drowning in longing for his pregnant wife Lenza during a lonely journey through space. His loneliness is exacerbated by the fact that the woman played by Carey Mulligan has left him.
The film by Johan Renck, the Swedish director of the Chernobyl miniseries, was applauded by the audience in Berlin, and the first reviews in the German-language media are also favorable. On the contrary, critics in English rate the work negatively.
The film based on the debut novel of the Czech writer Jaroslav Kalfara living in the USA was filmed by the Netflix video library. It will be on display there from next Friday, March 1.
Cosmonaut Procházka, who struggles with lack of sleep, technology and longing for a woman, sails in the film on a ship called Jan Hus to the mysterious Čopro cloud visible from Earth. At the same time, the space expedition somewhere far beyond Jupiter was not organized by the American NASA, but by a small Central European country competing with the slower South Koreans. For example, the cosmonaut has a connection with the control center in the Czech Republic without a time delay. As he mentions in the film, this is possible thanks to a communication system called CzechConnect.
“It’s a mission of Eastern European provenance, which means nothing here has the sheen of NASA,” Hollywood portal Deadline.com describes. “On the contrary, the cameras on board go off one after another and the noisy toilet keeps Procházka awake. Everything goes so badly for him that when he joins a global press conference to celebrate his heroism, he is asked by the public what it’s like to be the loneliest man in the world,” the article continues.
Very much from Elton John
Outdated, problematic technical equipment as well as large mobile phones were among the elements that the audience evaluated positively after Thursday’s screening at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele cinema. “I really liked that,” said one of the viewers. “I also think the spider is a good idea,” he added.
Adam Sandler plays Jakub Procházka. | Photo: Larry Horricks
A giant-sized spider is a key character. Procházka’s solitude attracted this being aboard the ship. Whether the spider is real is up to everyone’s interpretation. “I’m as real as you,” the spider replies to the cosmonaut, who worries he may be hallucinating.
With the spider, which Hanuš names after the supposed creator of the old town clock, the cosmonaut played by Adam Sandler faces the circumstances of his loneliness. The spider is voiced by Paul Dano.
According to Deadline.com, it all works for a while. “But the cuts and cuts between Jakub’s space solitude and the world down there, where the pregnant Lenka worries about the future of the unborn child, start to get a little tiring. Especially with the amount of memories that get mixed up,” the server notes.
According to him, even a less than two-hour film seems tedious. “It leads one to think whether the adaptation of the novel Kosmonaut z Cech is actually just a literal interpretation of the song Rocket Man by Elton John,” the portal thinks. In this track, the English pianist sings about an astronaut who misses both Earth and his wife and discovers that space is a lonely place. However, the Deadline.com reviewer considers it commendable that Adam Sandler agreed to be cast in a film that lacks even an iota of humor.
Carey Mulligan as Lenka and Adam Sandler as Jakub Procházka. | Photo: Netflix
Sponsors of the Czech mission
According to The Guardian, it’s a real shame that the film lacks any funny lines when both Adam Sandler and actress Carey Mulligan can deliver them. “As for Lenka, the character is woefully underwritten. We don’t know at all how she could fall in love with Jakub, for what reason she stopped loving him and why now it seems that she could fall in love with him again as part of some miracle of a cosmic revelation of intergalactic sympathy. It’s a space flight to nowhere,” says critic Peter Bradshaw.
Although, according to this Guardian author, the film lacks humor, part of the audience repeatedly laughed during some scenes at the Berlin screening – for example, at the advertisements for the products of the sponsors of the Czech mission, which the astronaut Procházka is forced to promote. First of all, it’s a medicine called AntiQuease for travel sickness. Someone in the audience was also amused by the spider’s interest in nougat cream.
While the Guardian compares the film to a flight to nowhere and Deadline writes about excessive length, the Austrian portal film.at, on the contrary, appreciates the impressive scenes in a state of weightlessness, the developing friendship between the Walk and the spider, or the fact that the film maintains tension until the end.
The Berlin daily Berliner Morgenpost also evaluates the news favorably, according to which the role of Procházka is even Sandler’s greatest mission. “It could have been satire, but the film adaptation of the novel is deep soul-searching and a veritable space opera with gigantic images of the cosmic nebula,” the paper claims.
Spider Hanuš was voiced by Paul Dano. | Photo: Netflix
Really deep
Actor Adam Sandler already spoke about the film at Wednesday’s press conference. “Me and the spider are digging really deep. I’m experiencing pain and he’s relieving me of it,” Sandler summed up the film as simply as possible.
The 57-year-old actor, who has been known for his comedic roles since the 90s of the last century, although he recently attracted attention with the drama Drahokam, came to the Berlin festival for the first time. He joked with journalists, for example claiming that when his colleague Paul Dano, who voiced the spider Hanuš, stepped out of the car onto the red carpet, “a crowd of four hundred spiders rushed at him and everyone started congratulating him”.
Adam Sandler as Jakub Procházka and Carey Mulligan as Lenka. | Photo: Netflix
Sandler said filming was challenging because of the weightlessness simulation. In order for the filmmakers to create the situation believably, the actor had to be suspended on wires and float in space. “I don’t have the most flexible body for things like this. Every day, when they hung me on the wires, I complained to the stuntmen that it hurt. They never believed me,” adds the actor.
Paul Dano told journalists that the spider Hanuš has been traveling in space for a long time and is therefore significantly older than the relatively young astronaut. “He’s accumulated a lot of wisdom over that time and he’s gotten into this almost Zen-like state of mind,” notes Dano.
According to actress Carey Mulligan in the film, it is the conversations with the spider that help Procházko to realize what is really important in life and that love matters most. The actress compares this awakening to when a person compares his priorities for the last time on his deathbed. “Wouldn’t it be great if we all had a spider like that in our lives to help us determine what’s most important?” asks Carey Mulligan.
Prague native Jaroslav Kalfař, who has lived in the USA since he was fifteen, first published the book in English under the title Spaceman of Bohemia. It quickly received reviews in newspapers such as the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, which is not common for Czech literature. Only then, in 2017, did it appear in the Czech translation by Veronika Volhejnová.
“The novel is very well read, if the reader does not mind that everything is served carefully so that even the laziest mind does not swallow it,” wrote the critic Petr A. Bílek in Hospodářské noviny, who read a certain mechanicalness and calculation in the prose.
Kalfař recently published the dystopian book A Brief History of Eternal Life. It does not spare the United States and warns against the extreme right and multinational corporations. “Today’s reality is so crazy that no author can beat it,” he said in an interview.
Video: I’m happy about the comparison with Kundera, says Kalfař
Czechs are still dealing with the communist past, writer Jaroslav Kalfař said in 2017 during a visit to DVtv. | Video: Martin Veselovsky