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Marketable rebellion

Two new Czech films tap the grotesque
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
October 3rd, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
What a load of Pollocks. Art has little to do with the artless Gympl now in cinemas.
COURTESY PHOTO
Twisted sister. A Buchty and loutky actor.
The grotesque continues to thrive in Czech cinema, which is not always cause for applause. Two relatively recent films, both playing with English subtitles at selected cinemas, at least have the benefit of coming from masters of the grotesque — namely, Tomáš Vorel and the puppet theater troupe Buchty a loutky. While one thoroughly embraces a giddy ghastliness as its aesthetic, the other throws up bits of grotesquerie merely as décor.
Vorel is the great satirist of Czech cinema, with a keen sense of the grotesque, as evidenced in his best comedies, 1990’s Kouř (the fall of communism through song and dance) and the pantomimic Skřítek from 2005. Even his finest film, 1997’s Kamenný most, is a serious grotesque, a gothic 8 1/2. Gympl, Vorel’s latest, employs caricature and wild exaggeration, but only fitfully and never successfully. The film’s primary problem is that it lacks focus and a defining tone, much like Vorel’s weakest film to date, the disappointing Cesta z města (Out of the City) from 2000. Is Gympl a dark farce or family drama? Both it seems, and worse: It’s a sellout.
Vorel’s alter-ego in Kamenný most, played by Tomáš Hának, has this lament: “The Americans have made all the movies. The cinema is dead here.” As proof of his own maxim, Vorel presents us with Gympl, a picture geared for teens that has cribbed everything from To Sir, with Love to Up the Down Staircase, with lashings of Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
Posters for Gympl plaster Prague like ads for a new band or teen rag, promoting Vorel’s same-named son (a promising young actor) and the smug, posturing Jiří Mádl, a talentless lad whose Mongoloid features have mysteriously charmed the hearts of Czech film audiences.
At what must pass as an “inner-city” school in Prague, disaffected teens Petr (Vorel Jr) and Michal (Mádl) find fulfillment in their nocturnal graffiti raids on blank walls and trains. The two are brimming with energy and talent, which is being artlessly drained from them by the deadening routine of school (a favorite trope of Vorel’s).
Only one teacher, their art instructor (Tomáš Matonoha), understands the boys and their circle, and tries as best he can to aid them, or at least keep them in school. He will purposefully expose them to prehistoric cave drawings in an attempt to stress that Petr and Michal’s own artwork has, at root, a spiritual component. He will go so far as to give the entire school’s interior over to his students as a canvas (while taking one of his girl students “from crayons to perfume”).
Unfortunately, as good as Petr and Michal’s graffiti is (and this nearly monochromatic film is only illumed by their vibrant pastels), we never sense what really drives them. As in so much of this film, there’s more posing than motive. James Bolton’s gritty indie film Graffiti Artist, regardless of the amateur acting, does a far better job of getting under the skin of spray-can expressionists.
The teachers and parents in Gympl (a roster of Vorel’s favorite actors) are mostly cartoons, frequently shot with a fisheye lens. For a director with a jeweler’s eye for composition, Gympl is sloppily slapped together. Yet its target audience, teens, will undoubtedly not care. “Cinema is just business,” Hának’s character complains in Kamenný most, and Gympl is just marketable rebellion without a cause.
Buchty a loutky’s Chcípáci (The Losers) is a bracing bit of wild macabre, with a script that could have been dreamt up by David Lynch. A good doctor who specializes in lavaging (the washing out of organs) prepares to do battle with his evil twin, who’s been confined to an asylum. With a backdrop of a Caligarian cityscape, Chcípáci is crammed with angels, skeleton-fixated boys, lost lovers, poisoners and a Spejbl and Hurvínek suffering from projectile vomiting and diarrhea.
The troupe’s brilliantly cobbled-together marionettes come complete with the voices of Aňa Geislerová, Matěj Hádek, Petr Čtvrtníček, Pavel Liška and Jiří Ornest. Chcípáci is more artful than Gympl and far more honest in showing what strings are attached.
    

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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