KAWASAKI'S ROSE (2010) (A-minus) - This gorgeous, delightfully meandering drama explores the idea of complicity with the Communist system and possibility of repentance ... and forgetting. It proffers the theory that just because one man sold out another to the Czech secret police back in the '70s or '80s, it doesn't mean that (1) the victim who ended up an exile didn't end up with a better life after all or (2) the informant should be exposed and punished or couldn't have made amends many times over.
Director Jan Hrebejk and writer Petr Jarchovsky, working a few years after the epic Stasi drama "The Lives of Others," subvert the genre's expectations and nuzzle into the grey areas of individual personal lives. They are blessed with a stellar multi-generational cast, with no weak links. Martin Huba takes the lead as Pavel, a revered psychiatrist about to receive national honors for his vocal actions as a dissident during the Communist reign. But Ludek, Pavel's son-in-law (Milan Mikulcik) -- who is shooting a film about Pavel and cheating on Pavel's daughter with a fellow crew member, Radka (an organic Petra Hrebickova) -- digs deep into Pavel's files and finds that his father-in-law actually long ago ratted on his patients, helping the government weed out the troublesome citizens. One of those was a drunken artist, whose relationship was destroyed, with Pavel swooping in to marry the woman and live happily ever after with her and the daughter.
The film-crew technique is a wise choice here, as Ludek and Radka track down the Stasi official who worked with (blackmailed?) Pavel and then travel to Sweden to find Borek (Antonin Kratochvil), who seems untraumatized by the events of the past. In fact, it is mainly the daughter, Lucie (Lenka Vlasakova), and Ludek (who always resented his in-laws) who are most upset about the treachery that happened long ago. Hrebejk allows room for the ramifications to unfold and either explode or disperse. Life can be messy, but as time goes by, it doesn't have to seem that way.
NAKED (1994) (Incomplete) - With the dearth of enticing new releases, we continue to burrow backward into the catalog of notable landmarks in cinema, and so we went back to the early '90s for Mike Leigh's celebrated Cannes breakthrough from London. He'd had a critical hit the outing before with "Life Is Sweet," and he continued his depiction of the gritty life of the working class with "Naked." (He would go on to a career of mixed results, nailing the genre most successfully in the aughts with "Vera Drake" and "Happy-Go-Lucky"
Unfortunately, this one has not aged well. We watched the first 15 minutes, which were filled with clever repartee that even the actors struggled to keep up with and pawn off convincingly as anything but the showing off of a screenwriter (Leigh). And then there were three rapes by two different men in that opening reel, and we just didn't have the patience to see if either or both of these brutes overcame their demons and grew as a human being to the extent that they managed to stop defiling anything that moved. File another one under "Life Is Short."
BONUS TRACK
The trailer for "Kawasaki's Rose": Here.
No comments:
Post a Comment