Up and Down, directed by Jan Hrebejk and written by
Petr Jarchovsky, (Divided We Fall) is in a way a
contribution to the spate of highly politicized films about
“globalization” but from an unexpected quarter. Most Americans
probably still think of the former Soviet bloc countries of Eastern
Europe as being ethnically more or less homogeneous, but those
countries are beginning to experience the same waves of migration
which are having such a profound effect on Western Europe — none
of them more so than the Czech Republic. Hrebejk cites as a
principal influence Stephen Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000),
and it shows. Like that over-ambitious film about the international
drug trade, Up and Down paints its portrait of social
upheaval on a broad canvas which, if not so broad as Soderbergh’s,
is nevertheless broad enough to convey the impression of rather too
much going on for the viewer quite to take in in under two
hours.
He tells mainly two parallel stories, though there is a third
lurking just around the periphery of the main narrative in the
shadowy presence of a couple of people-smugglers and their
underworld contacts. The film begins with the smugglers’ truck
ostensibly carrying furniture which discharges its cargo of Indian
immigrants just over the border at Breclav. But a baby remains
behind and, instead of dumping it in a ditch as one of the pair
suggests, they take it to some people who run a pawn shop. “Know
anybody who’d like to buy a baby?” they ask. As it happens, we know
somebody. Mila (Natasa Burger) is one of those sad women who are
barren but so desperate for a child that they are tempted to steal
one from somebody else. Her hulking security-guard boyfriend Franta
(Jiri Machacek) has spent some time in jail for soccer hooliganism,
and so they are unable to adopt. Without telling him, she spends
all their meager savings to acquire the Indian baby.
Franta is at first horrified — both because Mila has done
something illegal and so likely to get him in further trouble and
because of the child’s complexion. “My God!” he exclaims on first
seeing him. “He’s black!”
“He’s just dark,” Mila reassures him. “He’ll lighten up.”
“How?” replies Franta. “My God, it cost Michael Jackson millions
to lighten up.”
But soon he is so fond of the baby that he is prepared to be
drummed out of the brotherhood of Sparta Praha supporters which,
like many gangs of European soccer supporters, has the neo-Nazi
taste for racial purity as well as for street-brawling. Meanwhile,
at the other end of the Czech social scale, a professor called Oto
(Jan Triska) who suffered dispossession and persecution under the
Communist regime and has only recently been restored to his job and
his home, has an attack of some kind and decides to put his life in
order. “He wants to divorce Vera and talk to Martin,” his
19-year-old daughter, Lenka (Kristyna Liska-Bokova), is told.
“Who’s Vera?” asks the bewildered Lenka. “Who’s Martin?”
Her mother, Hana (Ingrid Timkova), has to explain to her that
Vera is her father’s legal wife and Martin is their son, her older
brother. The reasons for the fracture in the family and its having
been kept so long a secret are not disclosed, but Martin, played by
Petr Forman, son of the celebrated director Milos Forman, is duly
summoned from his own exile in Australia, and there is a
delightfully embarrassing dinner with him and his mother (Emilia
Vasaryova) sitting at the same table with Oto and his new family
and trying to “catch-up” while remaining more or less polite to
each other.
Somewhat oddly but in a way that appears entirely natural, the
fragile peace is shattered over the question of immigration. Hana
is a refugee counselor and Vera, though she is a Russian translator
and a woman of some culture and intelligence, allows her bitter
resentment of the “gypsies” who are moving into her poorer
neighborhood to provide the pretext for an attack on her hated
rival, the younger and prettier Hana. To this Martin objects on the
grounds that he is himself an immigrant back in Australia, where he
has a wife and a son whom she has never met. The wedge thus driven
between Martin and his mother, still resentful too over his leaving
to go to the other side of the world where she refuses to follow,
may be as impossible to heal as that between her and Oto. There is
more unhappiness ahead for Mila and Franta as well, and we are
finally left with the impression of a traditional society in a
state of change too rapid for its people to cope with.
Part of the reason is doubtless that the artificial isolation
and stagnation of the Communist period insulated the Czechs from
the mobile, multicultural world that we in the West have had more
time to get used to, but Messrs. Hrebejk and Jarchovsky have in
spite of their crowded canvas done a good job of making their
vignettes of the new Czech Republic — in the midst of which Vaclav
Havel puts in a cameo appearance as himself — stand for something
larger: the cultural meltdown of “old Europe.” That, I take it, is
why over the closing credits the camera lingers on the items of
Western kitsch — singing fish, crawling rubber hands and the like
— that are (or were) a shared joke between Vera and Martin. They
seem to me to stand for the sense of irony which once united Czech
culture and preserved it intact in spite of successive threats of
foreign domination. But the film-makers seem less than optimistic
that it will do so any longer.
