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Nellis' success no mystery to fans

Director's latest tells complex story of woman's IKEA life

July 18th, 2007 issue

Jan Přerovský/THE PRAGUE POST

Director Alice Nellis has a reputation for being able to juggle several strong characters in her films. enlarge

COURTESY PHOTO

Nellis sets the scene for singer Iva Bittová, who plays the main character in Tajnosti. enlarge

Tajnosti (Mysteries)

in Czech, with English subtitles
playing at Kino Světozor
July 1925 at 6:45 p.m.
Střelecký ostrov
Friday, July 20, at 9:30 p.m.

By Will Tizard

For the Post

It’s just another morning of café meetings and banana smoothies for screenwriter, director and playwright Alice Nellis as she tells the tales behind her latest hit, Tajnosti (Mysteries).

Thus goes the publicity push that’s expected to get audience numbers for her film up to around 100,000, a good showing in Czech cinemas these days.

But Nellis seems a bit vexed as she sits at the bar at Radost FX this morning, wearing a light summer dress with her trademark thick black curls pulled up in a royal-blue head wrap.

The night before, she agreed to do a question-and-answer session with students at a Tajnosti screening arranged by a university professor.

“She hadn’t seen the film,” Nellis says.

The teacher, clearly an admirer of her earlier films, Ene bene (Eeny Meeny) and Výlet (Some Secrets), told the class that their guest speaker captures the lives of ordinary people from small towns — a fairly apt description of those earlier movies.

Tajnosti, however, is a visually and musically sophisticated tale of a modern Prague woman who has found that the Ikea trappings of her new lifestyle, her marriage to a successful but emotionally absent husband and her inability to connect to her feisty teen daughter leave her with a void. And she’s going to do something about it.

“She was pissed at me, says Nellis of the professor, who questioned why she was portraying beautiful people and making Prague look lovely. The woman’s argument seemed to be that films about working-class people’s struggles are somehow more worthy than one about a woman who is free to drive around town in a Citroen, having affairs and browsing through old musical instrument stores, struggling for fulfillment.

“I felt like I was in front of a censorship board,” recalls Nellis, 36.

Most audiences and critics have been won over by Tajnosti, which takes on a central conflict faced by increasing numbers of Czechs of about Nellis’ age: the limits of material trappings as sources of happiness.

Fans, who have been waiting since 2002, when Výlet was released, have mainly heaped praises onto her new work, in which Nellis shows great growth as a filmmaker — even though her last film, a charming, low-budget road movie and study of family ties, won the New Director’s Prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival and a Czech Lion for its screenplay.

Robert Richter, a former film critic who scouts film talent in Central and Eastern Europe for the San Sebastian Film Festival, says Nellis is a unique discovery, not just for her ability to get the most out of actors but for the strength of her writing. “She cares about constructing characters in a way that they’re absolutely credible. The characters in her films, they really live, they breathe. She also has some nice humor — but she never overdoes something. The characters also have contradictions, which is very important.”

A few, though, seem to be wagging fingers, possibly because they’re struggling with a nuanced portrayal of city people with means who aren’t clearly evil or good.

Recent Czech cinema, after all, has not taken on this new role for 30-somethings with much depth; even films that have won critical praise, such as Beauty in Trouble and Restart, portray people with wealth as generally either vacuous or parasitic, reserving the real character roles for the workers of the world — generally hard-drinking, hard-smoking ones.

“I love Švejk,” says Nellis, referring to Jaroslav Hašek itinerary character, probably the apotheosis of the beloved loser hero, whose exploits as a drunken conscript with a genius for fowling up officialdom are much revered by Czechs.

“But does everything have to be Švejk? The world is different already. It’s changing.”

What inspired Nellis most when writing the script for Tajnosti, she says, is the crisis that so many of her contemporaries are going through in sorting out the role of money in their lives.

“They think, ‘If I get this and this and this, it will be better.’ ”

But, as Julie, the character played by Czech avant-garde singer and musician Iva Bittová, learns, finding real joy is a bit trickier than that.

And examining questions at the center of a society in transition can be hazardous, Nellis is learning.

During an online interview this week, she says, one person questioned not how or why this film was written and shot but why Nellis gave so “snobbish” a name as Ella Rose to her newly adopted 15-month-old girl.

Another said, “Your hair is awful.”

One critic slammed her for having Julie encounter a brooding young piano seller who has abandoned his playing for fear he wasn’t good enough but turns out to have phenomenal abilities.

Nellis, who has loved writing and story-telling since she was a little girl in Poděbrady, says she’s not too troubled by that critique.

“Why should it be bad that people can do something? For me, it’s interesting artistically, stories about people who have gifts. And, for her, the gift is not enough.”

As for the criticism that Prague looks “too beautiful” in her film to be real, Nellis lays that at the feet of Julie herself.

“When something is beautiful, it’s because she thinks it’s beautiful.”

Because the story is told from Julie’s point of view, audiences are taken into a world in which street people dance, Rollerbladers make balletic glides to the strains of Rachmaninov and fighting couples tango in crosswalks. And, somehow, through the eyes of Bittová, none of it stretches credibility.

Richter says it’s another Nellis trademark that she is confident dealing with a whole suite of characters, as she does in Tajnosti, rather than just two or three, which is often the maximum that new directors can manage well.

In particular, he praises “the flow of images and moods. It’s almost like, when [Julie] is with herself, her thoughts and reflections are like music.”

Nellis didn’t know Bittová and didn’t write the part of Julie with her in mind, she says.

“I picked Iva because she does not overact. When I see her just placidly watching a couple on the street, it’s her vision, of course. It’s an idea, it’s not just dancing. When you were falling in love, it did look beautiful, even when it looked shabby.”

Such controversy goes hand in hand with recently gracing the covers of Prague’s best-read current affairs magazines and running the talk-show circuit while courting international film festivals.

“It doesn’t feel like being a queen,” Nellis says. “It feels like someone whose behind on a lot of things to do.”

Keeping her feet on the ground comes naturally to this new mother, the youngest of three high-achieving sisters from central Bohemia. (She confesses she could never keep up with their grades and, although she enrolled in both a music academy in Prague and Charles University’s philosophy department, she only managed to finish the latter program.)

About music, which is central to her latest film, and painting, another passion of Nellis’, she says, “My hands weren’t good enough. So I let the real artists do that and I get to put it all together.”

There’s little question that Nellis has the chops as a writer, however. After reading the script Nellis had penned, Jan Svěrák, who is himself currently enjoying the success of directing his father Zdeněk in the hit Vrátne lahve (Empties), did two things: First he confessed he’d love to direct the film himself, then he agreed to produce Tajnosti — the first time he’d ever signed on for this headache of a job for another filmmaker.

Svěrák, who knows all too well what producing a film means after having brought seven of his own to the big screen since 1991, confesses he’d only do it for Nellis, calling her his matějska, which translates roughly as “fun fair.”

Although Svěrák once caused her great anxiety by telling her she had to cut down the number of takes and retakes if they had any hope of meeting budget, then shutting off his phone for five days, the collaboration has clearly worked well. Nellis is now finishing a second draft of a script for Svěrák based on the Grimm’s fairy tale Seven Ravens, a text also rendered by the 18th-century Czech writer Božena Němcová.

“Jan is crazy to shoot,” she says. “He thought we might this year — we even found the frickin’ ravens. They are actually training them and Jan was doing some experiments.”

Realistically, though, a spring shoot is more likely.

If moving into fairy tales seems a comedown after a prescient look at modern city lives in breakdown mode, neither Nellis nor Svěrák sees it that way.

“Fairy tales are probably more important than other things,” Nellis says. “I think kids are probably much more sensitive to whether it’s good or not. I have a kid, and I want her to see good stuff. You have thousands of fairy tales to choose from.”

Her 15-month-old, who has a cameo role in a critical moment for Julie on a tram in Tajnosti, is going to have at least one available his mother thinks is good enough to challenge her.

“I’m writing it for her for when she’s older. They do not go for bullshit. There are only a few stories to be told, but you have to tell it well.”

Will Tizard can be reached at features@praguepost.com

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