Neive Bellamy
Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.
Tyreece Hulme
One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.
Quiet Muffin
This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.
papasergey
Here comes another film allegedly banned in Russia... Whilst in large parts of Europe free from the proverbial 'Russian World global project' (especially in Czech Republic where it was shot), this controversial creative work has certainly not been out of place. Some are eager to make everyone believe that Russia is nothing but a detention camp where all are fed the same gruel, where it is foolish to expect that each cell will hold the net and that they will arrange a mandatory viewing of 'The Shawshank Redemption'. Well, boil over, you Stormy Petrels of the new Russian Revolution, there is still pluralism in contemporary Russia! And, in particular, the film we are speaking about was available on the festival 'CZECH IN', which has been held in Moscow, Saint Petersburg and a couple of major Russian cities annually for the last several years.However, my irony is easy to be parried by many of those who belong to the groups, for whom the words like 'KGB legacy in the modern Russian regime' or 'Ruscism' are password into the world of freedom of conscience rather than just empty words; of course, the expression 'modern Russia as a detention camp' is a sarcastic hyperbole under the motto 'no rest for the wicked regime': instead of resting on their laurels, those in power have to be constantly looking around, whether someone recalcitrant holding a brick, broken out of the walls of the Kremlin, is taking aim at them...But I personally am cowardly enough to prefer not to bother myself with such inconvenient questions as 'am I a hero or a timeserver', but also, from time to time, to make fun of those who do bother. Yet I understand that someday, I might be quite pinched on by the geese I am teasing here right now (should the time of such 'geese' indeed come in long-suffering Russia).However, I have watched 'Pouta' aiming completely not at that supreme and noble (in opinion of the civilised society, necessary to mention!) goal of ascension beyond that obdurate casemate, inveterately permeated with totalitarianism heavy smell, where Russia has again locked itself voluntarily. What an irony I have, writing all the aforesaid! Combating Putin regime by means of a film like 'Pouta'? (The main antagonist resembles Putin himself and is, just as Putin in the past, a Communist secret service functionary.) Homeric laughter! All the more so, none at all but festival maîtres, from which it has snatched its lot of praises, noticed it: box office was zilch... Everything is much easier: I wanted some suspense and noir from 'Pouta'. And, honestly, I have found some. Although I am not thrilled. The end was quite disappointing: I would not expect the main heroine to get away so easily. No, I am not a cruel person but a realistic one. So I expected such an ending from the film, where an innocent girl, a simple crane operator, rejected courtship of a villain, a communist serviceman, preferring rather death, that the fur would really fly... But alas, the man with a REALLY Russophobic last name, Rusnák, have not been monstrous enough... Despite Ondřej Malý, as the film was being watched, repeatedly made an impression of an actor able to play someone to be described like this: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. Just see: the best spy, in the opinion of the top-brass (next best, with the top-brass itself being the best of the best, certainly); hits densely when pistoling; would morally rape the dissident he 'takes care of' so that the latter is available for twisting around little finger (you bet: striking a chord in one's intimate life could be worse than the notorious third degree! however, he is able to smash anybody, even a tall trasher, despite being so short himself); but at that, he suffers awful fits (panic attacks, things like that) and occasionally behaves as a weak female (drinks heavily and complaints about his school past where he was bullied; breaks dishes and expels his wife from the own home). A fearful man altogether. Kind of a fairytale antagonist though – simultaneously fearful and funny. So he occasionally resembled... Grouchy the Smurf: would always be saying 'I hate' never mind appropriately or not... So in the end, he failed... P.S. A 2010 film. But the times they are a-changin': to date, it is quite a sedition even in Czech Republic. Since Zeman, the Czech President, likes Russia!
Tim Cawkwell
A sleeper, as these things go, now waking us all up. Made in 2009 and released in 2010 to a desultory response, the film then began to gather awards including a Czech Lion for best film in 2011. It toured the USA in 2012 and is one of a handful of new Czech films touring art-house cinemas in the UK at present (April 2013).No need to describe the plot – suffice it to say that it concerns a Statni Bezpecnost officer (i.e. secret policeman) in Czechoslovakia after 1980 (a Solidarity poster gives a terminus post quem) and before the Velvet Revolution of 1989. The film information and blogs refer to the fact that it is set in 1982, but there was nothing in the English sub-titles that I spotted to confirm this. This is a dark past which Czechs and Slovaks need to face up to; as did Lumet's Pawnbroker for a public understanding of the Nazi Death Camps when it came out in 1964, this film will mark an important Czech milestone in this process. The secret policeman is the magnet for the film. His victim,Tomas Sikora, is a shadow, although nuances of the portrayal may have escaped me.Unfortunately, in the modern manner, it is 146 minutes long. It begins tautly, but in the last 20 to 30 minutes this tautness is abandoned. Several commentators refer, correctly, to its noir elements but one noir element they ignore is the tightness that a 90-minute feature can create: beginning, middle and end.The digital camera work and choice of locations produces a highly convincing drabness, but for some reason – perhaps the continued sway of neo-realist precepts – it eschews close-ups of hands and objects, although it does close in on facial expressions effectively. And yet close-ups can be used to create suspense as Hitchcock well knew, and if we are watching a thriller not a historical tract, as we are, then close-ups could have been used to great effect: Antonin's paper bags, his gun, for example. And why not make a fetish out of the handcuffs he carries?One striking thing is the way it handles disparate groupings of characters: Tomas, Klara and Pavel; Antonin, Martin and the Lieutenant Major; Klara and Darina; Tomas and his family; and so on. Not quite Altman's Nashville but in its own way using a wide range of characters to evoke a whole society and era. No doubt this is what its director, Radim Spacek, would point to in order to justify the film's length. At the centre of it all is Antonin Tonda, on-screen for much of the film. The way he chooses to corrupt himself, beyond the control of his masters, is a metaphor for the way Soviet Communism corrupted itself. He starts as a risk to all citizens, but he turns himself into a threat to the whole state. When I came out of the cinema, I could see how the system that produced a narrative like Walking Too Fast could also trigger Bela Tarr's The Turin Horse (Hungary 2011), a re-wind of the Book of Genesis back to 'Let there be dark'.
Chris Knipp
Radim Spacek's Walking Too Fast has been described as a "political thriller," but its agenda is different. It has an abstract, absurdist quality that undercuts the suspense and excitement necessary to a thriller. Its mood is deliberately alienating, unlike Von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others, where we are drawn into the most minute details. There are similarities between the two films. Here too there is an intellectual under investigation, Tomás (Martin Finger), a dissident writer, a big, long-haired man with a nice house full of books, a wife, and a mistress, Klara (Kristina Farkasova), a confident and pretty ginger-haired factory-worker. There's not much about what he writes, though, or who his friends are. But he's repeatedly menaced and beaten, his adultery revealed to his wife, who kicks him out. He's offered the opportunity to leave the country with his family, which he initially refuses on moral grounds. There's little about the actual process of surveillance that is so central to Von Donnersmarck's film. This movie seeks primarily to show how the system of repression (it's set in 1982) destroys the people who enforce it, and it does that through a single compelling but repellent character, Antonín (Ondrej Malý), a star operative of the secret police (StB). He falls for the writer's girlfriend Klara, a useless passion that seems to lead to his ultimate meltdown, but most of his time is occupied with senseless violence and menace. Malý is a little, wiry, ferret-like man who resembles an Eastern European Matthieu Amalric. He has Amalric's face with the life and the handsomeness drained from it. He has Amalric's manic intensity but none of his warmth and vulnerability. Instead there's something genuinely scary about him. The film's "suspense" is watching to see what he will do next. Malý, who's in nearly every scene, is the chief reason for watching this movie, which may mean more to Czechs otherwise than to anybody else. They can read worlds into it. Outsiders will miss a convincing story, some excuses for what is going on, for how we get from point A to point B. The movie's structure is solely the structure of Antonín's downward spiral, spurred by discontent with everything, growing physical and psychological problems and his obsession with Klara. As one reviewer, Jason Pirodsky, put it, Antonín is "a Travis Bickle-like sociopath." But instead of being an alienated loner, he's part of the state machine, and he's running off the rails.Walking Too Fast (whose original title Pouta means "The Ties That Bind") omits details about the secret police's intelligence-gathering process. When he pulls in Tomás to an empty, low-ceilinged interrogation room, Antonín says, "Do you know why you're here?" but he doesn't, and Antonín doesn't tell him. We see Antonín and a group of his cohorts getting drunk together -- another stage for unnerving, mad behavior -- and it shows they are afraid of him but don't admire him. Eventually he beats up a lot of people, singlehanded, on screen, but he also has panic attacks, and after burning one man with a cigarette he burns himself too. He carries a plastic bag to breathe into to ease the panic attacks, at least one of which comes in the middle of beating someone. No doubt about it, Antonín isn't having a good time. Walking Too Fast has some of the qualities of a film noir or a whodonit, though its loser protagonist brings his troubles on himself and earns no shred of sympathy from the audience. However this is where Malý's cold intensity as an actor comes in. He makes Antonín an inexplicable force of nature, a man possessed by an energy that's destroying him. Though the beatings are repeated without the sense of a buildup to anything, there are good scenes in Walking Too Fast. The ones where Antonín forces his wife to move out and uselessly corners Klara and proposes an affair are particularly memorable. There's good work from all the cast. Lukas Latinak is fine as Antonín's mellower, tricky Slovak cohort and so is Lubos Vesely as a timid intellectual forced to play informant. I particularly liked the Eighties-ish electronic score by indie musician Tomas Vtipil, which sets up the uneasy mood of the scenes and provides an unsettling jauntiness to the closing credits. The cinematography of Jaromir Kacer is impeccable. I just wish the writer, Ondrej Stindl, had put a dash more humanity and three-dimensionality into the script. Writing ultimately makes or breaks a film and here a little more story logic would have expanded the potential audience. Pouta took home a raft of honors at the Czech version of the Oscars. It has appeared in half a dozen international festivals and opened theatrically in the Czech Republic in February 2010, but it sold fewer than 17,000 tickets. It may have a better life as a DVD when viewers can take breaks from its 142-minute length. Seen and reviewed as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, April 2011.
carbon-12
This is very straight forward picture about raw reality if you did not fit right into the society system during communism time. I expect everyone ho likes themes with strong psychological lines will be interested as well as people who are interested in picturing the society on the east side of 20th century world. My movie-genre orientation is a bit different and i selected exceptionally this type of movie. Even through i got quite deep impression and would not say anything particularly bad. The set and the actor performances are convincing with topping main character impersonated by Ondrej Maly as Antonin. Not to say only pros - there have been some parts of the story which i would rate as a bit weaker, but i could not describe the details without spoilers.
