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Out in the country

Bohdan Sláma's latest should have been better
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
March 26th, 2008 issue

Nature or nurture. Pavel Liška comes to terms with himself as a country teacher.
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Venkovský učitel


Directed by Bohdan Sláma
With Pavel Liška, Zuzana Bydžovská, Zuzana Kronerová, Miroslav Krobot and Ladislav Šedivý
First Hřebejk’s Medvídek, then Vorel’s Gympl: Now we have a disappointing film from the usually excellent Bohdan Sláma, which leaves one wondering why Czech film is suddenly flailing. Gympl is beneath lengthy discussion, and properly ignored. But Medvídek had many good moments and qualities about it, which is much where Venkovský učitel stands. Both start promisingly, but then their directors seem to give up halfway through and try coasting on their past work.
The first hour of Venkovský učitel is almost exquisitely shot and paced. A young natural-science teacher from Prague (Pavel Liška) arrives in a provincial Czech backwater to work at the local school. The headmaster at first questions the teacher’s reasoning for forsaking an acclaimed academy in Prague to take on his rustic, near-feral charges, but the teacher makes clear he’s looking for space and quietude — qualities that will quickly vanish from the landscape.
He’s arrived in a typical outlying farm village. Most everyone gets through the drag of their days slightly drunk, impatiently waiting for the annual village fetes that grant them excess. Refreshingly, the town drunks are not portrayed by Sláma, as in so many Czech features, as garrulous eccentrics and dizzy comedians, but as fully fleshed creatures who have lost any feeling of purpose in life. It’s a pastoral scene shot through with sadness and loneliness.
When the teacher meets a local farm owner, Marie (Zuzana Bydžovská), he allows himself to be absorbed into her world. She’s a hardworking widow trying to control both a large herd of cattle and her brattish teenage son (Ladislav Šedivý).
Having been shown little gentleness in her life, Marie finds herself drawn to the quiet, studious teacher. While lying near each other on the top of a haystack on a hot summer day, Marie will make a sexual advance, which the teacher simply can’t respond to. Firmly holding the tatters of her pride, she makes a joke at her expense, jumps down from the haystack, and drives her tractor across the field toward home, where she’ll find solace in a bottle.
It’s here that the real reasons for the teacher’s departure from Prague begin to be revealed: He’s a self-torturing homosexual who has fled a loveless relationship. Losing himself in the bucolic expanses of the Czech lands seems preferable to the urban misery of a man who aches for love but lacks the honesty and strength to seek it. Unfortunately, as Marie has fallen for him, he in turn is smitten by her son, the ruttish, churlish Tadzio of the tale. And this is where Sláma loses his film.
The first problem is the director’s crass lapses into the discarded psychological verities about homosexuality that thankfully went out of general service sometime in the 1960s. The teacher’s family life? Naturally, there stands the Draconian mother looming over an ineffectual husband, whom the house ogress delights in pillorying as a “mediocrity.” This, obviously, explains our protagonist’s bent, angst and impulsively suicidal air.
Tyrannized by his appetites, he will make a move on Marie’s son as clumsily as she did with him, but with worse consequences. Leaving aside questions of etiquette, there’s little rationale given for this gentle teacher (beautifully played by Liška) falling for this stoned and uncombed lout, smelling of the cowshed. One is reminded of writer Hervé Guibert, who once wondered what fulfillment there could be in taking some dumb, sullen boy to bed, since they would have nothing to contribute to the conversation afterward. Surely, the teacher could do better.
The whole devolves finally into a lesson on diversity studded with platitudes and clichés, with not a little flea-market symbolism on hand. The ending, which Sláma decides to decorate further with a blast from what sounds like a Motorhead tribute band (we’d been treated to Vladimír Godár’s Mater up to this point), might have worked if it didn’t seem stolen outright from Richard Pearce’s superb little ’70s film, Heartland.
The performances, however, are really very good. Liška is clearly the finest actor of his generation, and he’s easily matched by Bydžovská, one of Czech cinema and theater’s two great plain women — the tragic mask to Eva Holubová’s laughing one. Bydžovská’s weather-etched face and faultless sincerity make her character’s awkward missteps and private expressions of pain almost unbearable to intrude upon.
Zuzana Kronerová and Miroslav Krobot are equally strong as the teacher’s parents, and it’s a pleasure to see Liška and Kronerová together again after their work in Sláma’s excellent Štěstí. Yet it’s that last-named film, not Venkovský učitel, that must continue to serve as Sláma’s best.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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