Director:
Biser A. ArichtevCámara:
Karel FairaislMúsica:
Michal NovinskiReparto:
Marián Labuda ml., André Hennicke, Viktor Preiss, Dana Droppová, Jiří Vyorálek, Vladimír Polívka, Ondřej Vetchý, Vítězslav Jandák, Ondřej Malý, Pavel Kříž (más)Sinopsis(1)
The film is based on the extraordinary true story of one of the most scorned figures of Czech and European history, a Minister in the Protectorate government, Emanuel Moravec, an apostle of collaboration, betrayal and moral decay. The unsightly countenance of the bloated bald head with buggy eyes brings to mind a parody of a fiend taken from comics. We would expect that only a fool would fall for Nazi ideology... But when we take a closer look at Moravec’s personality, we get a completely different picture: a refined, educated, rational man, who took words such as “fatherland, nation and democracy” deadly seriously.
In 1938, E. Moravec had a career as a legionnaire, professional soldier, renowned military theoretician and well-known journalist, and he expected to climb the social ladder. But then the Munich Agreement was signed and Moravec was pulled into the vortex of history. As this tragic figure strides towards his bitter end in this horrific time, we are left with the unpleasant question: “How would we have acted in his place?” (ČSFD)
(más)Reseñas (2)
A history lesson told mechanically with zero inventiveness, its historical core comprising one cliché from start to finish (note that true stories can be told creatively, too – but that is not the case here), with pathetically silly dialogue scenes and monologues, not to mention that this entire “insight into Moravec’s private life” is delivered in a way that simply doesn’t interest the viewer. And then there are the issues with the actors’ physical PROPORTIONS and their placement in front of the camera in various scenes. Labuda plays a colonel of medium height, though the actor himself is of very short stature (that’s not a criticism, just a simple fact), i.e., risers and footstools come into play for shots in which several actors find themselves standing next to each other (Tom Cruise could tell a story or two about that). Well, in this case, they were absolutely careless about continuity. Two examples shall suffice to make my point – when the camera shows us full-body shots of Vetchý and Labuda from head to toe, e.g. as they walk next to each other, Labuda is visibly shorter by half a head. But in shots of the two from the waist up, Vetchý is shorter than Labuda by half a head or, at most, the same height. The same happens with Moravec’s ex. The actress is visibly half a head taller than Labuda, but in dialogue scenes, she looks up to her husband from twenty centimeters below. I understand that this is standard procedure when shooting short actors and that risers have been used for them since time immemorial (just have a look at old Hollywood classics from the 1950s, in which actresses come up to their partners’ shoulders, even if that partner was the famously stumpy Humphrey Bogart), but in this case, the boys and girls doing the legwork for Mr. Arichtev simply failed to do their job, with a laughable result that you cannot fix in post-production :o).
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One of the film’s major assets was casting Marián Labuda Jr. into the role of Emanuel Moravec. However, I wasn’t happy about who was cast in the other roles (Edvard Beneš, Emil Hácha), even though I do like Viktor Preiss and Milan Kňažko. If I were not to overly analyze it, the story was quite decent. I would have given a higher rating, if only the creators had made a bit more effort. At times I felt like some of the crew members were under influence (especially the sound engineer).
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