Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/22/23

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, November 22, 2023

Wolf's Hole (Vera Chytilová, 1987)

Cast: Miroslav Macháček, Tomás Palatý, Stepánka Cervenková, Jan Bidlas, Rita Dudusová, Irena Mrozková, Hana Mrozkovy, Norbert Pycha, Simona Racková, Roman Fiser, Frantisek Stanek, Radka Slavíková, Jitka Zelenková, Petr Horacek. Screenplay: Vera Chytilová, Daniela Fischerová. Cinematography: Jaromir Sofr. Production design: Ludvik Siroky. Film editing: Jirí Brozek. Music: Michael Kocáb.

If Wolf's Hole sometimes feels a little, well, cryptic, that may be in part because we're not attuned to the cultural idiom of a 1980s Czech filmmaker like Vera Chytilová. But it may also be because she's being intentionally crypic, slyly making her film a portrait of life under an authoritarian regime by doing just enough to trick the censors. It's ostensibly a horror movie about teenagers on a ski trip who find themselves at odds with the adults supervising them. The adults are an older man who wants them to call him "Daddy" (Miroslav Macháček) and his younger assistants, Dingo (Tomás Palatý), and Babeta (Stepánka Cervenková). They quickly reveal themselves as truly eccentric people -- if "people" is what they are. To reveal any more is to deprive the new viewer of a nice "Say what?" moment. There's not a lot of skiing done on this trip. Instead, the teens are subjected to a good number of indignities, culminating in Daddy's order that they must pick one from their group to die. It's an itchy kind of movie without a lot of horror movie shocks but instead a fine way of keeping everyone, both the characters and the audience, off balance.