Film Review: Pupendo By Darren Baker, April 2003

česky

The title of Jan Hřebejk's new film Pupendo refers to the slightly demented game of slamming a coin down on another person's bare gut. It's shown in the movie to comic effect but how it actually relates to the story itself is anyone's guess. Pupendo is another period piece from the collaboration of Hřebejk and screenwriter Petr Jarchovský. Their previous effort, Divided We Fall (Musíme si pomáhat), was a World War Two tale that ended with a Russian, Jew, German and Czech man all gawking at a Slovak woman giving birth. Their big hit before that, Cozy Dens (Pelíšky), gave us a cranky old man playing the Czech national anthem on the piano as Russian tanks rumbled into Prague in 1968. Fortunately, Pupendo was spared a similar cheesy ending. The trailer poster shows a chunky bather looking timid and lost in the mist of Hungary's Lake Balaton. That's where he and his family have to spend their vacation after helping another family in low standing with the authorities. Their plan had been to go to the seaside in Yugoslavia, where the other family could only dream about going.

Pupendo is a story about two families set against the backdrop of art and politics. A talented artist is blacklisted by the Communist government following the Russian occupation. Since he can't live from his art and he won't take a day job, his family has to make kitschy ceramic ornaments to get by. A chance encounter with an art historian combing through a garbage can brings the artist back into contact with a former student and lover. She's more ambitious than principled and can make life easier for him in return for some gesture art. The artist can handle making a wall mosaic for her husband's school, but a hideous statue of a Russian marshal is naturally more problematic. Eventually it doesn't matter. Through the art historian, their names land on the Voice of America, and as a result, both families end up in the drink together.

With his scruffy appearance and raspy voice, Bolek Polívka's artist is reminiscent of the one created by Nick Nolte in 1989's Life's Lessons. Nolte's real life whacked-out persona helped him pull off his obsessed artist. Polívka's artist is obsessed with nothing, least of all with art. We see him talk a lot, smoke a lot, hanging out on his boat and cooking up insurance scams. The closest we actually see him doing art is the wall mosaic and it looks like it could be pieced together by the janitor. Eva Holubová plays his long-suffering wife. She doesn't eat all the dumplings she had to in her earlier work for Hřebejk, but he has her looking pretty dumpy here nevertheless. In stark contrast is Vilma Cibulková as the woman who has it all together. She puts her career on the line for her old flame and her body on the line for the director. In the film's silliest scene, she storms out of the shower to defend the Russian marshal in the flesh. Jaroslav Duąek, who plays her principal husband, has no such body and needs none. Hřebejk has cast him as a collaborator so many times before that the part almost seems natural to him. Jiří Pecha brings a soft-spoken elegance to his role as the art historian who rediscovers the artist. What service he actually performs for him by doing so is open to debate.

When their names are heard over the banned radio station, the two couples fret for what seems like an eternity about what the fallout will be. Thirty years before, it could have meant the uranium mines in Jáchymov. Now their chief worry is where they will be able to spend their vacation. If it seems so petty, that's because Hřebejk is showing us life during "normalization", the period that followed the crackdown in 1968, specifically 1981. Those people deemed normal to go to the seaside; those who weren't had to settle for the misty lake. That simple.

A movie with such strong political overtones can't, in the end, escape viewers seeing it their own way. Pavel Liška turns in a fine performance as a local goofball who has just returned from his mandatory army service. There are those who argue that's what the army did to young men in those days - turned them into goofballs. Then there are those who say nonsense, that Liška plays the best goofball in the business and Hřebejk merely had that in mind for his story. That simple.

The movie scored huge success on its opening weekend due in part to people looking for a follow up to the thoroughly entertaining Cozy Dens. But it was also helped by the fact that normalization is in once again in the Czech Republic, at least if what's on TV is any indication. Films that were made during that period are more popular than ever, as are their stars. What isn't popular is that country once considered the official enemy of normalization. With gripes about imperialism and consumerism on the rise, America is viewed today with even more suspicion and disgust than it was twenty years ago. Pupendo looks back to that period and offers a nostalgic look at an age when people, like the ones in this film, would spend their time by the river and in pubs rather than inside plush theaters at the shopping mall and munching on junk food. Of course, there were no shopping malls in those days, but that's beside the point.