Bedrich è un grande artista, uno scultore che fa la fame, una moglie che lo ama davvero, due bambini, di cui uno sordo.
la sua colpa è quella di aver sostenuto la Primavera di Praga, e gliela hanno fatta pagare, la libertà e la coerenza non sono gratis.
poi incontra un barbone, che ospita a casa, Bedrich è un uomo buono, e indovinate chi è quel barbone?
mica ve lo dico.
di Jan Hrebejk è arrivato al cinema The teacher, solo quest'anno.
buona visione - Ismaele
la sua colpa è quella di aver sostenuto la Primavera di Praga, e gliela hanno fatta pagare, la libertà e la coerenza non sono gratis.
poi incontra un barbone, che ospita a casa, Bedrich è un uomo buono, e indovinate chi è quel barbone?
mica ve lo dico.
di Jan Hrebejk è arrivato al cinema The teacher, solo quest'anno.
buona visione - Ismaele
…This movie
is a comedy-drama about the 1980s in Czechoslovakia, and that little joke sums
up the Czech perspective pretty well. Yes, we're living in crap, but
nonetheless it's home. The story follows a talented Prague artist, Bedrich
Mara, who in the heady years around the 1968 Prague Spring was one of the top
artists in the country with his work shown in the west. But he refused to make
the necessary compromises (join the communist party presumably) and has fallen
out of favor with the authorities. He loses his job, is ostracized from the art
community, and barely brings home enough for his family by making kitschy clay
things, like a money bank that looks like a butt. The movie tells the story of
a summer in which on a bit of a lark, he brings home a bum. The bum turns out
to be an art historian caught at a particularly low point. And through a
bitter-sweet series of events, he helps Bedrich return to the international art
world -- although at costs that have a certain black humor to them…
…A slice of life as seen by the director
during the pre-Velvet Revolution days, the film, much like most Czech films
made in the period following communism, presents the picture of an
intelligentsia desperately yearning for change. It remains a popular subject
for Czechs to this day, and the film duly obliges. But it is also a breezy,
well made comedy that directly addresses its audience – one of the reasons for
its box office success. While I couldn’t yet make a connection between the
film’s title – alluding to a prank game played using a coin, and the film’s
context, it is nevertheless entertaining, and Recommended Viewing..!
…As with his previous two films, Hrebejk and scripter Petr
Jarchovsky (who share a “film by” credit) mix dark humor and grim drama in
equal measure. Pic’s title comes from the childish prank of slapping a heavy
coin on the bare stomach of a victim who has been promised something
pleasurable, a startling, if tenuous, metaphor for Socialism’s illusion of
stability and prosperity that morphed into the sting of repression.
So too, the rigidity of life at the time is spoofed at
every turn, though much of the humor is so insular as to be puzzling to an
outsider.
Pitched firmly between the dramatic depths of his perf as
the rural priest in Vladimir Michalik’s “Forgotten Light” and the manic country
bumpkin of Vera Chytilova’s “The Inheritance,” Polivka’s characterization is
neither fish nor fowl, befitting the odd tenor of the times but making his
character difficult to grasp…
…Pupendo is a story about two families set against the
backdrop of art and politics. A talented artist is blacklisted by the Communist
government following the Russian occupation. Since he can't live from his art
and he won't take a day job, his family has to make kitschy ceramic ornaments
to get by. A chance encounter with an art historian combing through a garbage
can brings the artist back into contact with a former student and lover. She's
more ambitious than principled and can make life easier for him in return for
some gesture art. The artist can handle making a wall mosaic for her husband's
school, but a hideous statue of a Russian marshal is naturally more
problematic. Eventually it doesn't matter. Through the art historian, their names
land on the Voice of America, and as a result, both families end up in the
drink together.
With his scruffy appearance and
raspy voice, Bolek Polívka's artist is reminiscent of the one created by Nick
Nolte in 1989's Life's Lessons. Nolte's real life whacked-out
persona helped him pull off his obsessed artist. Polívka's artist is obsessed
with nothing, least of all with art. We see him talk a lot, smoke a lot,
hanging out on his boat and cooking up insurance scams. The closest we actually
see him doing art is the wall mosaic and it looks like it could be pieced
together by the janitor. Eva Holubová plays his long-suffering wife. She
doesn't eat all the dumplings she had to in her earlier work for Hřebejk, but
he has her looking pretty dumpy here nevertheless. In stark contrast is Vilma
Cibulková as the woman who has it all together. She puts her career on the line
for her old flame and her body on the line for the director. In the film's
silliest scene, she storms out of the shower to defend the Russian marshal in
the flesh. Jaroslav Duąek, who plays her principal husband, has no such body
and needs none. Hřebejk has cast him as a collaborator so many times before
that the part almost seems natural to him. Jiří Pecha brings a soft-spoken
elegance to his role as the art historian who rediscovers the artist. What
service he actually performs for him by doing so is open to debate.
When their names are heard over
the banned radio station, the two couples fret for what seems like an eternity
about what the fallout will be. Thirty years before, it could have meant the
uranium mines in Jáchymov. Now their chief worry is where they will be able to
spend their vacation. If it seems so petty, that's because Hřebejk is showing
us life during "normalization", the period that followed the
crackdown in 1968, specifically 1981. Those people deemed normal to go to the
seaside; those who weren't had to settle for the misty lake. That simple.
A movie with such strong
political overtones can't, in the end, escape viewers seeing it their own way.
Pavel Liška turns in a fine performance as a local goofball who has just
returned from his mandatory army service. There are those who argue that's what
the army did to young men in those days - turned them into goofballs. Then
there are those who say nonsense, that Liška plays the best goofball in the
business and Hřebejk merely had that in mind for his story…
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