*Kolya: Czechs and balances
EASTERN Europe produced some terrific films in the days when directors had to skilfully weave their way around the state censor. Yet, since the fall of communism, the former Eastern Bloc has virtually become a cinematic wasteland. The reason is clear – state subsidies dried up. This only emphasises what the great Polish director Andrzej Wajda once said: “There’s always a chance to get round political censorship. It’s much more difficult to beat the censorship of money under capitalism.”
Which is why it is so important that Jan Sverak of the Czech Republic won the Foreign Film Oscar with Kolya last year. The film may not have been the best candidate, but it’s been a record-breaking triumph at a Czech box-office otherwise crowded with Hollywood films.
Watching this story of a middle-aged Prague cellist struggling to bring up a five-year- old boy dumped on him by the Russian woman who has paid him to marry her, you can’t help seeing connections with the admired Czech new wave of the Sixties, that produced, among many others, the Jiri Menzel of Closely Observed Trains and The Fireman’s Ball and Milos Forman’s pre-Hollywood films, Peter And Pavla and A Blonde in Love.
There is the same emphasis on quirky character-drawing, almost the same political awareness – Kolya takes place during the build-up to 1989’s Velvet Revolution – and a similar focus on charm, humour and sentiment.
Sverak’s first feature, Elementary School, was nominated for an Oscar in 1992. Since then he has honed his talents with a big- budget science-fiction parody and a shoestring road movie. Kolya is his surest mixture of form and content yet.
The cellist, played by Zdenek Sverak, the director’s father, who also wrote the screenplay, is a lifelong womaniser who is rude to the bureaucrats who run the orchestra like everything else, and thus gets demoted to playing at funerals. His marriage to the Russian actress, who immediately decamps to Germany, enables him to pay off his debts and buy a car.
The small boy (Andrei Chalimon) makes life difficult, coming into the bedroom as he’s trying to seduce a young student and talking endlessly in a language he can’t understand. Slowly, the two form a bond, and when the authorities threaten to part the pair, it takes the Revolution to keep them together.
The bearded Sverak doesn’t overplay his hand. His slow-burning style looks underpowered at first. But the longer the film progresses, the better it becomes, and the natural, unforced acting of Chalimon is a joy.
As with the old Czech cinema, the film is full of elliptical comments about the culture and politics of the time: the cellist’s mother complains bitterly about a country that has Russian soldiers around every corner, and the last throes of a stolid Communist bureaucracy are very well- drawn.
But Sverak junior doesn’t paint the Russians as villains.They are more like puzzled spectators of what is going on in a country just beginning to wake up to its true self.
This is a film that seems to believe in common humanity rather than systems, so that it’s mostly the intimate drama that feels important.
Kolya may not quite measure up to Menzel or Forman. It’s a little too facile for that. But it points the way out of the morass of cruel, ironic thrillers and silly comedies with which Czech and other eastern European directors feel they have to regale their audiences now that Hollywood has arrived on their doorsteps. And for that we should give thanks
— Kolya opens on circuit on Friday July 25