A movie about a 70-year-old woman who goes all Charles Bronson on a bunch of thugs? Half the fun of writing it must have been thinking up a title. Granny Get Your Gun immediately springs to mind, or, given the spaghetti western motifs in Jiří Hájek’s score, how about A Fistful of Werther’s? No, wait! A Mouthful of Dentures? Or, considering what must have been the film’s main influence, we could just go with Gran Torino…
Whatever, Radek Bajgar seems to have missed a trick on the title, ending up with the far more generic Teroristka, or The Lady Terrorist, or Shotgun Justice, as it is also known in English. Then again, there is more to this comedy than an old woman waving firearms around. As with his earlier thoughtful dramedy Tiger Theory, the director creates another terrific character for a senior actor. This time the beneficiary is Iva Janžurová, screen veteran of the demented Morgiana (where she played a dual role) and comedy classic Maracek, Pass Me the Pen!
Here she plays Marie, a kindly former teacher who lives in a cosy riverside settlement that is popular with retirees and weekenders from the city. She helps look after her ailing friend Eva (Eva Holubová), whose dying wish is to spend her remaining time on earth in her beloved holiday cottage by the water. However, her peace is shattered by the rowdy local bar pumping out music until the early hours of the morning.
Marie appeals to the mayor, Helena (Tatiana Vilhelmová), to uphold the bylaws and enforce quiet time overnight so Eva can get some rest. Unfortunately, Helena is having an affair with Mr Mach (Martin Hoffman), a slimebag businessman from the big city who, thanks to his power over the mayor, lords it over the settlement and its residents like a mobster.
Mach is a thoroughly despicable character. He treats the locals with utter contempt and has the megalomaniac scheme of creating a new sport called “Moto-biathlon” with the gang of roughneck hunters and bikers who hang out at the bar, thereby creating his own militia of armed hicks on motorcycles. Things escalate when Lenka (Kristína Svarinská), a single mother living next to Eva, sabotages a meeting of the two-wheeled thugs with a spray can of very strong glue.
As the situation worsens (spoiler alert: the dog doesn’t make it in this one), Mach blackmails Lenka and plans to buy out the land from under the community. In response, an increasingly desperate Marie takes things into her own hands. She visits her shady former student Trpělka (Pavel Liška) to buy a gun…
After watching the deadly serious In the Shadow recently, I decided to go back and check out one of David Ondříček’s earlier, funnier ones and was pleasantly wrong-footed by One Hand Can’t Clap. It is an offbeat crime comedy that gets steadily weirder and sillier as it goes on, tempering the zaniness with the same kind of deadpan fatalism that was such a big feature of his previous hit, Loners.
Ondříček brought many of his Loners stars and crew along for this feature, and the continuity shows – the excellent cast seem completely at ease and totally onboard with the wacky material, written by the director with his two leads, Jiří Macháček and Ivan Trojan.
Macháček plays Standa, a good-natured but gullible loser who is talked into taking the fall after he is busted smuggling a lorry load of endangered birds. After a spell in prison and keeping shtum about the other parties involved in the crime, he meets up with his former boss Zdeněk (Ivan Trojan), the sinister owner of a swish vegetarian restaurant who has heinous plans for his illicit live deliveries. Zdeněk plans to compensate Standa for his time spent behind bars but the handoff is screwed up by Ondřej (Marek Taclík), a hapless store security guard who thinks he’s some kind of badass super cop.
Ondřej and Standa have become fast friends after they were both outwitted (it doesn’t take much) while trying to catch a shoplifter, and Ondřej’s efforts to help his newfound pal out usually end up making things much, much worse. After Standa is rescued from a near-drowning by two shroom-hunting women, he is convinced that he must bring Zdeněk to justice.
After our two halfwit heroes join forces with the girls, Andrea and Martina (Kristina Lukešová and Isabela Bencová), the clueless foursome go on an undercover caper in Zdeněk’s restaurant to unravel the mystery of the illegal rare animals…
You can watch In the Shadow (Ve stínu) right HERE with our View on Demand partners Eyelet
Around the time U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy was fervently whipping up fear of Communism during the Red Scares of the 40s and 50s, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was conducting witch hunts of its own. The purpose of these show trials was twofold – to trick citizens into believing that the country was under threat from real and imagined enemies, and to frighten the populace into staying in line while the regime consolidated its power. Over 250 people were executed as a direct result, while many others were incarcerated or sent to work camps.
In the Shadow is a sombre paranoid thriller set against this backdrop of fear and intimidation, in the run-up to the devaluation of the country’s currency which left many Czechs and Slovaks facing financial hardship.
It might seem churlish to call it a paranoid thriller when the regime really was oppressing, torturing and vanishing people, but I mean it in a positive sense. The film is in the tradition of the classic American paranoid thrillers of the 70s, like The Parallax View, The Conversation or Three Days of the Condor. It also recalls Chinatown with its period setting, noir-ish touches and a larger public scandal running in the background. And, in evoking the Hollywood style, it plays more like a straightforward thriller than a typical low-key Czech movie. With more violence, too.
The film opens on a dark rainy night where we meet with two small-time crooks as they break into an office and rob a stash of gold and jewels from a safe. It seems a fairly straightforward case for Captain Jarda Hakl (Ivan Trojan), the methodical detective assigned to investigate. However, a planted clue leads him to another “suspect” instead, a middle-aged Jewish chap named Kirsch (played with hunted intensity by Miroslav Krobot).
Hakl smells B.S. straight away as Kirsch’s alibi holds up – he was locked up in a drunk tank on the night of the robbery. Nevertheless, the patsy confesses to the crime and State Security agents muscle into the case. To further stoke his suspicions, a German agent called Zenke (Sebastian Koch, who also starred in the similarly-themed The Lives of Others) takes up residence in Hakl’s apartment building and seems to pay more attention to his wife and kid than he does…
What originally seemed like an open-and-shut case deepens into a larger conspiracy aimed at eliminating several innocent Jewish citizens. As the bodies pile up and sinister characters lurk in the shadows, can the honest detective bring the scandal out into the open without risking the lives of himself and his family?
The outcome of the mystery won’t come as a huge surprise to anyone who has seen a paranoid thriller before and/or knows a little bit about how oppressive regimes ruthlessly shut down anyone who poses a threat. The strength of In the Shadow lies in its slow-burn storytelling, which is carefully and deliberately unfolded by director Ondříček, and its superb craft. The film is beautifully shot by Adam Sikora who really emphasises the noir elements of the story, indulging in the deepest, inkiest blacks at the darkest end of a gloomy but rich palette. The crisp photography combines with marvellous production design to create a vivid recreation of early-50s Prague at a time of great political turbulence.
Ivan Trojan – looking a little like David Byrne from Talking Heads – is a dependable lead, playing Hakl with a low-key determination and transparent integrity that keeps you rooting for him as he willingly ensnares himself in the evil machinations of the State. Sebastian Koch, the German Major with eyes on both the case and the Czech detective’s movements, plays Zenke with understated menace and a hint of deep sorrow – yes, he’s one of those troubled characters with a dark history.
What originally seemed like an open-and-shut case deepens into a larger conspiracy aimed at eliminating several innocent Jewish citizens. As the bodies pile up and sinister characters lurk in the shadows, can the honest detective bring the scandal out into the open without risking the lives of himself and his family?
The outcome of the mystery won’t come as a huge surprise to anyone who has seen a paranoid thriller before and/or knows a little bit about how oppressive regimes ruthlessly shut down anyone who poses a threat. The strength of In the Shadow lies in its slow-burn storytelling, which is carefully and deliberately unfolded by director Ondříček, and its superb craft. The film is beautifully shot by Adam Sikora who really emphasises the noir elements of the story, indulging in the deepest, inkiest blacks at the darkest end of a gloomy but rich palette. The crisp photography combines with marvellous production design to create a vivid recreation of early-50s Prague at a time of great political turbulence.
Ivan Trojan – looking a little like David Byrne from Talking Heads – is a dependable lead, playing Hakl with a low-key determination and transparent integrity that keeps you rooting for him as he willingly ensnares himself in the evil machinations of the State. Sebastian Koch, the German Major with eyes on both the case and the Czech detective’s movements, plays Zenke with understated menace and a hint of deep sorrow – yes, he’s one of those troubled characters with a dark history.
You can watch Doubles, aka Doppelgängers (Dvojníci) right HERE with our VOD partners Eyelet
In 1999, a resident of Kansas City, Missouri named Richard Jones was banged up for aggravated robbery. The crime took place across the state line in Kansas City, Kansas, where a woman was knocked to the ground in a Walmart car park by three muggers who made off with her phone. Jones claimed that he was home at the time, but eyewitnesses identified him as one of the culprits. He was sentenced to 19 years in prison.
17 years later, Jones was released when police traced the real perpetrator, Ricky Amos, Jones’s “doppelgänger” who lived on the Kansas side of the city…
The idea of the doppelgänger, or a person’s perfect double, has long caught the imagination and there are dozens, if not hundreds, of examples in literature, film and TV. More often than not, the appearance of a doppelgänger in a character’s life spells trouble.
The well-worn concept is the subject of Jiří Chlumský’s likeable crime comedy Doubles (Dvojníci). Ondřej Sokol has fun in a dual role as two men with a striking similarity to one another: Honza Rambousek, a down-on-his-luck Prague thief in debt to his crime boss, and Richard Prospal, a mild-mannered teacher who is in town for a conference…
You can watch Gangster Ka: Afričan right HERE with our View on Demand partners Eyelet.
In last week’s review of Gangster Ka, the first instalment of Jan Pachl’s two-part crime thriller, I signed off hoping that the second chapter would do a Godfather: Part II and improve on the original. I meant it jokingly, but against all the odds Gangster Ka: Afričan bears out that comparison. Not in terms of craft, themes or quality, of course, but in the sense that it expands on the groundwork laid out by the first film, broadens the canvas and gives the characters more room to breathe. And it certainly makes for a far more entertaining movie…
You can watch Gangster Ka right HERE with our View on Demand partners Eyelet!
The first thing you’ll become aware of while watching Gangster Ka is that people talk about money. A lot. And by a lot I mean all the time – in the first half an hour, I was so bombarded by characters I’d barely met talking about large sums of cash that I considered breaking out the abacus to help keep up.
So what? You might think. Gangsters like money, don’t they?
Of course they do, but it got me thinking about how true classics of the gangster genre aren’t really about money at all. Take Goodfellas, for example. There’s plenty of cash floating around throughout the movie, and at one point some characters pull off a lucrative airport heist. Yet while our protagonist Henry Hill sure enjoys the money, it’s the life of a gangster that he’s addicted to. And, through his eyes, we are too.
The main problem with Gangster Ka is that it thinks the most interesting thing about its protagonist, Radim Kraviec (Hynek Čermák), is how much loot he’s making through his various scams. Ironically, this preoccupation with cash really cheapens an otherwise routine crime thriller.
Kraviec, based loosely on the real-life crime boss Radovan Krejčíř, is a mobster from Ostrava who heads a gang of Albanian criminals. Deciding the city is too small for him, he sets his sights on Prague and wastes no time hustling his way into some big scores, such as taking over Čepro, a company that owns the whole country’s fuel supplies. Along the way, he double-crosses the capital’s established kingpins, Milota (Miroslav Etzler) and Sivák (Alexej Pyško), and gains a glamourous wife, Sandra (Vlastina Svátková). His next goal is muscling into politics, with a view to getting the future Prime Minister in his pocket.
Things quickly go south when an associate informs on his plan to make his 3 billion Čepro tax bill disappear, and Kraviec finds himself doing porridge while his lawyer and his loyal lieutenant Dardan (Predrag Bjelac) busy themselves bribing judges to ensure his quick release. Meanwhile, Milota and Sivák realize it’s the perfect time to seek revenge…
Czech Film Review 