The Line

The Line of Life Remains Constant

Slovak filmmakers remain loyal to thematic realism, they continue in social criticism and in the depiction of the manifold malfunctions of the state. However, reflection is appropriate, the current socio-political situation affords many impulses and, finally, journalists are not the only ones qualified for this role. Art has the ability to enhance the knowledge of reality. The Line courageously drew on the well-tried theme of smuggling on the Slovak-Ukrainian border, and thereby got itself into a risky position, not only with regard to authenticity, but also the idea it wants to address to sensitive Slovak audiences.

Adam Krajňák is the main character of The Line (Čiara). The cigarette-smuggling gang leader is an anti-hero for whom the viewers have a liking, even despite his illicit source of living; well, he does love his family, he is a (sometimes even brutally) just and beloved boss who, in principle, refuses to have anything to do with drugs. Allocating the title role to Tomáš Maštalír who meets (perhaps too much) the current attributes of the physical beauty of a so-called lumber-jack also increases the viewers’ liking for him. However, the attractiveness of the criminal should not serve the story genre, rather the chosen benevolent view of the criminal activities. We gradually discover that, as is usually the case in the criminal world, Adam is just a tiny bit bigger fish in the pond. It becomes more and more inevitable that he will be caught, depending on how well he obeys Krull, who ranks above him in the gang.

Family relations constitute the second line of the story; these evolve from the business activities of the head of the family. All the other members of the family do not just complement Adam’s world, they are directly linked to the film’s main theme or even influence its classification as a genre. Adam’s mother, his wife and his oldest daughter are the most important ones. In describing them, an analogy with a gangster movie comes to mind, which is a genre closer to The Line than the thriller genre which is often used to classify the film. The protagonist’s mother, Anna, originally led the difficult life of a physically abused wife but, thanks to her inner strength and determination, she managed to get up on her feet, got rid of the undesirable ones and established a smuggling trade which was later taken over by her only son. The seemingly submissive position of a fragile grandmother walking with a stick is quickly overlaid by her resolute statements and commands. The founder of the family business remains in the background, keeping the aces up her sleeve. Conversely, Adam’s wife Saša is full of emotion and she would rather leave the family business than further support it. She represents both the attractive and passionate femme fatale and, simultaneously, the family protector. Accordingly, it becomes inevitable that she leaves the family. The eldest daughter Lucia serves as a means of expressing the basic feature of the main hero – his love for his family. Lucia brings her fiancé Ivor into the story who is then introduced to the secrets of the smuggling world.

The many characters of the film usher in scenes that are often associated with the depiction of gangs or the mob in film. “Our” family also meets the types of people and situations that are characteristic of the genre – this includes the training of a new member of the family in illegal practices, the punishment of betrayal among smuggling colleagues and almost poetic discussions between Adam and the top representatives of the criminal underworld based on ingenuity or analogies, or the parallel montage of celebrations and the imminent tragedy. The gangster movie presents stories from the viewpoint of the “bad guys” in the fight with the even “worse guys” and The Line divides these groups up on the basis of the nature of the smuggled goods and their consequences for society. Adam refuses to smuggle drugs, while he doesn’t question the illegal trade in cigarettes and refugees despite the questionability of its financial gains or the welfare of his family. High returns are usually linked with high risk and unpleasant consequences, such as imprisonment – in the worst case, even loss of life. In addition, Adam risks his family happiness every day, and that without any pertinent profit. Hence, the question arises: “Why?” Unlike the motivation of his right-hand man, Jona, Adam’s motivation to continue taking chances is minimal, we do not sense the endeavour and, at the same time, the inability to tackle the problem. The fight with fatalism is absent, we sometimes even get the impression that the hero can at any time kiss the disconsolate situation good-bye. The lack of answers and the lack of eff ort on Adam’s part to fight against the situation drains all the tension from the fi lm, and it does so right up to the moment of betrayal. After this moment all possible exits are closed. Just like when the Titanic hit the iceberg – some people managed to get out from the lower deck, but others remained in the centre of the room and helplessly watched as all exits became closed. Just like Adam.

Antiheroes have the ability to appear mysterious, we seek to uncover the reason for their behaviour and our affection for them, even though on many occasions these are characters with fundamental flaws in their character. That is why a film should enable us to gain a better than shallow insight into their psychology, to uncover the face behind the mask, either via a monologue, a subjective view, the reactions in an extreme situation, or in any other way. The filmmakers depict Adam as a man of action, who at first gives the impression of being a big boss at home and at work, but who ultimately has nothing to offer to his family and audiences. Where Bebjak’s previous film The Cleaner (Čistič) was brilliant, The Line fails.

So we had better return to the more inspiring genre classification of the film. Corrupt police and criticism of the establishment are usually essential parts of a gangster movie; in our case this also plays in the hands of the filmmakers in their eff ort to maintain realism at the thematic level. The atmosphere of brooding tension, fear or sudden twists in the plot is relieved by occasional comic moments which ensue mainly from the limited vocabulary and education level of the smugglers – these sometimes appear like caricatures. As the line between humorous and not so humorous moments is thin, sometimes the humour is cheap and shallow. However, satire works well in the given theme, hence further attempts to make the audience laugh seem to be redundant. Adam’s briefings of his gang, which start only after everyone lights up a cigarette, are a sort of mockery or parody of mobster films. The lighting of cigarettes might be a ritual, an analogy with similarly dangerous characters in other films or maybe just the result of the fact that the smugglers always have cigarettes to hand. And when a van carrying cigarette cartons meets with an accident, we see almost the whole village smoking, even the very youngest ones. We encounter characters from socially weaker groups in The Line more frequently, they help to complete the picture of this sleepy corner of Slovakia, characterised by indifference to the lack of decent jobs. The critical view offered in Bebjak’s film does not give the impression that the problems can be tackled; it rather just illustrates that there is no resolution to the situation. Therefore, The Line contains observations about the economic instability of the country and the maladies of the post-revolution period, and even though the impact of these attributes on the lives of the family is visible in the story, it is not of primary importance. As for the formal aspect, a dynamic camera with attractive image compositions, enriched by non-diegetic music with folklore motifs, complementing the atmosphere of a village on the border, is characteristic of The Line, unlike several other domestic social dramas. The Line attracted very sceptical Slovak viewers; the audiences filled cinemas readily. However, the question is to what extent the film really does address them. I am afraid that Adam’s weak points (apart from his relation to the law) bring the ambitious project down and the hole that opens up in the film’s foundations cannot be sealed even by information about secondary characters, or twists and turns in the plot, tragic departures or artistically motivated images. The evident excess at several levels of the fi lm is simply a burden and it then becomes all the more demanding to sort out what is essential in order to have a fully-fledged experience. Accordingly, The Line leaves the viewer behind the imaginary line, even despite the local theme, a relatively expensive production or the cast of popular actors. In this case, less would have meant more.

The Line (Čiara, Slovakia/Ukraine, 2017) DIRECTED BY Peter Bebjak SCRIPT BY Peter Balko DOP Martin Žiaran EDITED BY Marek Kráľovský MUSIC Slavo Solovic CAST Tomáš Maštalír, Emília Vášáryová, Zuzana Fialová, Andy Hryc, Eugen Libezniuk, Filip Kaňkovský, Milan Mikulčík LENGTH 113 min.

Peter Bebjak (1970)
He studied acting and directing at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. In 2001, he established D.N.A. Production together with Rastislav Šesták. This production company completed several television projects, such as Greatest Criminal Cases in the History of Slovakia (Najväčšie kriminálne prípady Slovenska), City of Shadows (Mesto tieňov), Dr. Ludsky, Behind the Glass (Za sklom), Murder Police (Mordparta) and Specialists (Specialisté). He made his fulllength feature film début in 2011 with Apricot Island (Marhulový ostrov) which won the Grand Prix at the lm festival in Rouen, France. In 2012, his horror movie Evil (Zlo) was premièred. The Cleaner (Čistic) was Bebjak’s third full-length film in cinema distribution. His latest film The Line (Čiara) won, for instance, the Best Director Award at the 52nd Karlovy Vary IFF.

— text: Lea Pagáčová —
photo:
Wandal Production —

Nina

Nina Appeals without Being Literal

Young protagonists are all the rage in the current wave of Slovak social drama. Juraj Lehotský’s full-length début The Miracle (Zázrak), Iveta Grófová’s Made in Ash (Až do mesta Aš), Zuzana Liová’s The House (Dom) and last year’s Little Harbour (Piata loď, dir. I. Grófová) or Filthy (Špina) by Tereza Nvotová present multi-dimensional female characters. It is diffcult to say whether this represents a trend or is just a coincidence. It might have been caused by the fact that women do have more diffcult lives from childhood and audiences can thus more readily identify with their fates and show more empathy and compassion. That is why it is all the more remarkable that Lehotský did not venture on a purely social drama in his new film after the maybe too depressing The Miracle.

Nina is an eleven-year-old girl who loves swimming and hates or does not understand mathematics. Her parents – somewhere in their late thirties – are getting a divorce and Nina finds herself in joint custody. Her mother is somewhat more successful as far as finances are concerned, as she works in Austria, lives in a family house and is trying to build a new relationship with her colleague. Her father is a crane driver at the Bratislava docks and his daughter’s visits to his workplace are among the moodiest and most elegantly shot scenes of the film. Throughout the film we see mainly cuts from the house, the docks, from the father’s sparsely furnished apartment and from the swimming pool. As Nina is continually on the road between both her “homes” and the swimming pool, the camera also cleverly focuses on claustrophobic shots from both cars. And, to be precise, close-ups of faces in the cramped space add drama to the dialogues during yet another transit from one place to another.

Juraj Lehotský intentionally avoids broaching financial questions, the broken family is not in a more difficult economic situation and this decision of the author is justified and logical. First, we can quickly classify the protagonists as Bratislava (more or less) middle class – within this environment their fates appear to be more credible and many a viewer-parent will recognise that their own family could easily get into such a situation at any time. Next, the state of mind of the child (but also that of the parents) yearning for a peaceful loving life in a complete family is the object of the authors’ interest. Nina is not a victim of bullying at school, she is not experiencing her first love, she does not feel any desperate lack of money. Accordingly, the director, as co-writer (together with Marek Leščák), does not intervene in the psychological concept of the fi lm with any superfluous superficial detours which might be attractive for the audience.

We find ourselves together with Nina, so to say, in the midst of events right from the very first scenes. Thanks to the cleverly conceived exposition, we quickly discover the state of affairs and the feelings of the characters. Ultimately, we do not require any further plot information. As viewers we take our experience from real life, and the question of the specific reasons preceding a divorce in a modern Slovak family is largely irrelevant for the child’s state of mind – of course, so long as the reason is not domestic violence or aggression when a divorce would actually mean liberation. The way the individual characters are depicted does not indicate anything like that, the love of both parents for Nina is incontestable right from the beginning, regardless of what we think of her “selfishness” – particularly in the case of the mother. Lehotský’s presumption of life experience on the part of the potential audience, and his reliance on it, is decisive and thanks to this Nina never becomes superfluously literal. That is why we never learn what preceded the divorce, nor what will follow once the fi lm ends. This presentation of what represents, in essence, an infinite number of possible variants on the plot turns out to be a clear intention on the part of the authors towards the audience, and it can bring intellectual satisfaction as well as a certain frustration from what remains unstated. Maybe that is why more experienced people in middle and older age will like Nina. In this case, the plot is simply a kind of manual enabling the viewer to assemble an overall, much more comprehensive, picture of the destinies of one family which has become unravelled.

Lehotský unerringly adapts the film’s audiovisual form to the content of the script. As co-author, he is very well aware of what he wants to say, and he often says a great deal just via image and sound. The consummate editing of some scenes is worth mentioning; several times we witness short cuts of shots of a lonely mother, lonely father and lonely daughter in semi-close-ups or close-ups. This way of expressing the isolation of the individual characters that originally functioned in one family could not have been bettered. We are reminded of the joint moments of happiness that will probably never return, solely by way of photographs and hardly discernible videos on the cell phone. The chosen style and darker image-tinting create a unified atmosphere for the work and at some moments – for instance, in the port scenes already mentioned – a kind of agreeable melancholy comes to prevail. No wonder Nina feels better there than in the enclosed spaces. With the exception, of course, of the swimming pool – a metaphor for escape, but also for the protagonist’s fighting spirit and ability to swim or rather “not drown” in real life which does not correspond to her and our ideas of perfect happiness. And so, despite its small number of characters, the film never gives the impression of being a “filmed theatre performance”.

As for the acting performances, suffice it to say that the casting was perfect. Thanks to the mature script, Bibiana Nováková as Nina, Petra Fornayová as the mother and Robo Roth as the father know what to play and they fit into the demanding roles of “sane, fully aware people in a difficult life situation”. It may well be of interest for fi lm critics to monitor the collaboration of Lehotský with Roth. Nina is definitely not “The Miracle II”. Robert Roth plays a diametrically different role to his role in the 2013 film and there is no reason to discontinue this alliance in Juraj Lehotský’s next project.

If you simply ask whether the director’s new film is better than his feature début The Miracle, the answer can be found, in part anyway, in your genre preferences. A family drama from the lower middle class or an uneasy social drama from the fringes of society? What is more important is the statement that Lehotský’s script and directing make more of a mature impression this time, albeit not quite attaining “perfection”. A third film with another charismatic female protagonist and a rather more courageous deviation from the formal trends of contemporary festival film towards an even more pronounced, more distinctive, authorship could achieve it. To date, all the steps have been taken in the right direction.

Nina (Slovakia/Czech Republic, 2017) DIRECTED BY Juraj Lehotský SCRIPT BY Marek Leščák, J. Lehotský DOP Norbert Hudec EDITED BY Radoslav Dubravský MUSIC Aleš Březina CAST Bibiana Nováková, Robert Roth, Petra Fornayová, Josef Kleindienst, Miroslav Pollak, Simona Kuchynková LENGTH 82 min.

Juraj Lehotský (1975)
He studied photography at the Secondary Technical School of Art in Bratislava and then documentary filmmaking at the Academy of Music and Performing Arts. He has directed several short films and has made contributions to large series. He made three full-length projects – the documentary Blind Loves (Slepé lásky, 2008), the feature film Miracle (Zázrak, 2013) and another feature film Nina (2017). The former won many awards, interalia the C.I.C.A.E. (International Confederation of Art Cinemas) Award in the Quinzaine des Realisateurs (Directors’ Fortnight) Section at the Cannes IFF; in Slovakia it won five national  lm awards – Sun in a Net – including the award for Best Documentary and Best Director. Lehotský’s film Miracle was awarded a Special Mention in the East of the West Section at the 48th Karlovy Vary IFF and the Best Actress Award for Michaela Bendulová at the 23rd Film Festival Cottbus. Nina, for instance, won the Bronze Pyramid Award at the 39th Cairo International Film Festival or the FIPRESCI Award at the 33rd Warsaw International Film Festival.

— text: Erik Binder —
photo: Punkchart films —

OUT

Out – Ágoston’s Journey a er Work from Slovakia to the East of the EU

“The sea begins here, but it deffinitely doesn’t end here.”

The Slovak-Hungarian-Czech film Out by director György Kristóf is the full-length début from this native of Košice who graduated from FAMU, Prague, in film directing. It was the first film in Slovakia’s history to receive its world première at the Un Certain Regard competition section at last year’s prestigious Cannes Film Festival where it vied for the Golden Camera.

In soccer terminology an out means that the ball is behind the line, outside of the playing area, which means that its position and existence are insignificant with regard to the further development of the game. It can be replaced by another ball, set aside or lost forever. However, the principles and rules of the game are not in any way disrupted by this fact.

When watching Out we get the impression that, following his dismissal, the protagonist, the fifty-something Ágoston, chooses as his next life trajectory a route that takes him as far as possible from the known game plan of his current life, certainties and practices. At the beginning he appears as clueless as Gregor Samsa in Franz Kafka’s story Metamorphosis who wakes up one morning and discovers that he has been transformed into a huge insect and, in effect, everything has changed for him irreversibly. Ágoston also finds himself in a new situation, behind the line and “out of the playing area”. He must learn to face up to new challenges and confront coincidental and unforeseeable realities. The repercussions that he feels in these confrontations drive him even further away from the traditional world and thinking to places where the social categories which were quite normal for him up to that point cease to exist. From that moment on, Ágoston’s unusual adventures are determined by the need to succeed in the new situation, both in his own eyes and those of the world. He resolutely takes a further step behind the line, having broken loose from his home and the habits that determined the rhythm of his everyday duties until then, into a zone beyond the traditional social category.

Then the film is conceived as a road movie. At the symbolic level, it is accentuated as the pilgrimage of a fisherman from a small European country as Slovakia after work but, paradoxically, eastwards, to the shores of the vast sea where far bigger fish swim than the ones he is familiar with from the pond. The desire to catch them becomes a fateful challenge for Ágoston and his journey to this target acts as a film parable on the absurd functioning of our society.

In a certain sense, his endeavour is reminiscent of the protagonist’s fate in the Russian (Soviet) film City Zero (Gorod zero, dir. Karen Shakhnazarov, 1988). The similarity between the engineer Varakin and the protagonist of Out is all the more distinctive as, despite a relatively logical initial motivation – Varakin tries to arrange a business matter, Ágoston heads eastwards for work – both face the struggle between loneliness and absurdity which colours the reality of our world, whereby the materialised expressions of this absurdity take on more and more surrealistic contours. For this reason both directors, Shakhnazarov and Kristóf, resort to symbolic means of expression which enable them to encompass the absurd manifestations of reality more accurately and to offer the viewer a certain tangible key for the interpretation of gradual scenes and sequences. The changes in the situation are then determined by an unconventional logic and original interplay of meanings which does not always have to be explicable down to the tiniest detail.

Shakhnazarov tried to capture the emotions of the contemporary Russian (Soviet) man in the late 1980s. To achieve this, he used the analogy of city Zero to convey the structural absurdity in the way the Soviet bureaucratic machinery worked – he chose to employ apparently surrealist symbols and absurd situations in order to depict it and he was not afraid to cross the lines of common logic. By contrast, Kristóf does not deviate from recognisable reality in Out. In the fi lm, the symbolic level and absurdity are firmly embedded within the realistic scope of the free-flowing situations which Ágoston experiences on his journey outside of the game plan. The director’s criticism of social conditions is revealed by means of a deviation from the imaginative axis of the standard, which from the perspective of our society makes things automatically redundant, worthless and devoid of purpose, just like our hero in his current life situation. In order to emphasise the dictate of the “standardisation” of everything and everyone and of its implications for the individual in the current “European western civilisation” from Porto to Vilnius, Kristóf uses a symbolic-metaphoric apparatus based on the theme of fisheries and other associated motifs related to it. Everything is standardised, without any exception. No matter whether it is the size of an apple, a fish, or an individual and his thinking or social behaviour. This dominant symbolic-metaphorical theme runs through the entire story. Figuratively speaking, we can perceive Ágoston as being the fisherman, the bait, and also the imaginary catch. Despite finding himself abroad, out of his home pond, he has a will of his own and voluntarily heads to the sea to free himself from the dictates of the “standard” which engulfs us in all spheres. Anything not conforming to it is automatically excluded, it is “out” and hence becomes redundant. Just like Lev, the stuffed earless rabbit which, fulfilling the role of the protagonist’s materialised alter ego, travels with him for a part of his journey to the sea in order to ultimately fall into the hands of a similar outcast once more.

Not only are the sizes of the fish standardised, but also the instruments by which the fish are caught. If the fish are too small, they are unsuitable and redundant, in both consumption and economic terms. It is considered normal to have a job, family and friends. Whoever doesn’t have them becomes untrustworthy. Again, in consumption and economic terms. In Out Kristóf highlights the fact that a system set up in this way inevitably produces a certain type of individuals who are non-standard in the view of the current consumer society, and thus get assigned beyond the general and social interest against their will. Being so small that you get caught in the mesh of a fishing net is just another manifestation of inconvenient size. You are either caught in the net or on the hook and you correspond to the standard or your existence is pointless. Fish which are too small are rejected. That is because they don’t even fit into a sardine can of standard size where the fish are optimally placed as if according to a ruler.

After a series of rebounds behind the line, Ágoston often finds himself in situations which consistently exclude him from the game plan. Out of his job, his family, home, out of the shipyard for being late, out of the disco. Just once he tries to fight with a seemingly equal rival while visiting the absurd couple at their home. However, Dimitri and his artificially enhanced girlfriend are virtually an epitome of consumer values and orthodox exponents of traditional rules. Once the supersized lips modified by botox reminiscent of a fish mouth kiss an icon, it is clear that Ágoston cannot win this fight. They overcome him again and definitively kick him out without any means. And, paradoxically, all that just because he revealed his alter ego – the earless rabbit Lev – in front of his new friends.

Kristóf’s story is overfilled with bizarre people, places and situations which represent characters and phenomena from both sides of the line. Ágoston’s female counterpart is the mysterious basketball player Gaida who gives him the earless rabbit as a relay baton and thus definitively marks him out while she herself disappears from the story forever. Her presence is just a memento which shows the peripheral existence of numerous similar lonely destinies like the one that Ágoston encountered.

Wild animals are also an important symbol of the story; they have to be taken care of. In the words of the employment agency clerk, that is because they do not have the option to independently apply for a job like people do. Even though people and their economic and consumption reasons determine that we perceive even wild nature through standardised categories. Ágoston, once again symbolically, comes to terms with himself and the absurdity of the world in the position of an unskilled deckhand on a trawler manned by his fellow countrymen. In the sea he is no longer catching fish with a rod as he did previously, but in a net and he sweeps non-standard specimens back into the sea with a broom. However, he does not feel any guilt because in this way he at least feeds the redundant fish to the gulls, which gives a higher meaning to the seemingly useless fish in economic and consumption terms – these fish have become food for animals that are otherwise “unsuitable for employment”.

Anyone who wants to catch fish must have a suitable fishing rod. But even that is not enough if you don’t catch fish of the required size with it. The size of the artificial lure is equally important. The one he brought along is not suitable for catching fish in the sea, which is why he heedlessly sweeps it together with the under-sized fish back into the sea, which in the figurative sense reflects the completion of his inner transformation. He has come to terms with fate out on the open sea and among animals, far from the places where social rules and standards apply. Beyond the game plan where the picture of a nun drinking Coca-Cola during a bus pause at a filling station somewhere in Poland is the symbolic expression of the sanctification of the consumption direction of our society.

As regards the film’s formal aspect, the precise work of director of photography Gergely Pohárnok attracts particular interest; his previous works include, for instance, the Hungarian director György Pálfi ’s Hukkle (2002) and Taxidermia (2006). The visual division of elements within the images is characterised by well-constructed composition-shape solutions which define what the main protagonist feels and goes through. Sometimes they emphasise his feelings of withdrawn ness, his gradual opening up or searching for a new direction, while at other times they evoke a promise of Ágoston being liberated from the overwhelming weight of reality. Pohárnok works sensitively with the atmospheres of the scenes and he chooses the angles and dimensions of the shots with great care in order to support the final conclusion of the storyline through contrasts in shapes and sizes, through the proportionality of the lines and the extreme close-ups of things up to abstraction. The visual solutions without superfluous words emphasise the symbolic-metaphoric level of the narrative in an original manner and enhance the action with shape-spatial meanings.

If you also would like to discover where the sea begins, don’t pass up on the opportunity to see this original film.

Out (Slovakia/Hungary/Czech Republic, 2017) DIRECTED BY György Kristóf SCRIPT BY Gy. Kristóf, Eszter Horváth, Gábor Papp DOP Gergely Pohárnok EDITED BY Adam Brothánek MUSIC Miroslav Tóth CAST Sándor Terhes, Éva Bandor, Judit Bárdos, Ieva Norvele Kristóf, Guna Zarina, Viktor Nemets LENGTH 88 min.

György Kristóf (1982)
A native of Košice, he studied philosophy at the University of Miskolc in Hungary where he discovered his fondness for film. To fulfil his dreams, he worked in the production teams of Hungarian films and in big American productions (The Eagle, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, The Secret of Moonacre). He worked as assistant director under Ildikó Enyedi and Daniel Young. In 2008, he started studying directing at FAMU in Prague where he made several short films presented at more than fifty festivals. After receiving his Bachelor’s Degree in 2011, he moved to Riga in Latvia for a year; there he worked as the director in charge of the preparation of TV commercials. After returning to Prague, he started work on his full-length feature début Out which was eventually selected for the Un Certain Regard Section and the Golden Camera Award at the 70th Cannes Film Festival. He is currently preparing a dance sci-fi thriller with the working title Bunker.

— text: Martin Palúch —
photo: Sentimentalfilm —