Josef K. goes cycling

Protektor 2009 Czech Republic (102 minutes) directed and cowritten by Marek Najbrt.

This story goes to the heart of the difficulty of living in twentieth century Central Europe: great power actions force small countries’ citizens to face large unpleasant facts and make momentous decisions about their lives.

Protektor revisits the painful history of the effect that the Nazi occupation had on the people of Czechoslovakia, particularly the generation of young adults who came of age in the first free, independent and short-lived Czechoslovak Republic (1918-39).

The ‘difficulty’ lies not so much in the history and politics per se. Those abstract concepts only isolate individual citizens, making what had been a small nation a holding pen of second-class people. Each individual must make personal decisions to save his own livelihood that bear grave consequences for his family, friends and neighbors—not to mention for himself, when conditions change.

This would be a good film for those who look in retrospect at periods like Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich or even the McCarthy era or the American civil rights movement, certain that they would have acted with fearless resolve had they been there.

The movie opens with a Hitler mot translated into Czech about the Czech character:

‘Čech je cyklistou, jenž se nahoře hrbi, dole však šlape.’—A Czech is a cyclist who hunches over as he pedals.

The same ‘light hearted,’ jocular attitude clearly carried over to that nation’s next guardian in the east: Czechs are laughable Svejks who deserve whatever they get because theirs is a little country that cannot protect itself. The high-principled West did not do much to help matters in either instance.

Bicycling moves the plot forward. These Czech bicyclists do not hunch over but ride upright, though their motion forward lends only an illusion of moving away from one thing or toward another. It was not just Franz Kafka’s Josef K.

Emil Vrbata (Marek Daniel) works for Czechoslovak state radio in Prague. His wife Hana Vrbatová (Jana Plodková) is a film actress who just finished shooting her breakout starring role, with more on the way.

Unfortunately for the gifted, beautiful—and Jewish—Hana, it is late 1938. By the following spring, Nazi Germany had incorporated the former Czech lands into the Third Reich as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

Emil is a regular, everyday guy, popular at work. When a colleague, Franta Vrana (Martin Myšička), decides that he must continue to ‘call it as he sees it’ as a radio broadcaster, despite instructions and warnings from German and Czech Nazi higher-ups, Emil gets an option. Franta is finished. Emil can take Franta’s place, or leave the station; if he takes the job, the Nazis also will leave Hana alone.

Franta had dismissed Emil’s suggestion that if they were smart about what they did, they would give themselves ‘a chance to express our views pretending we mean the opposite’ in a way their listeners would understand. This safely cautious view turns out to be Emil’s first step on the slick slope of collaboration.

On the other hand, once the Germans occupy the country and take over its institutions, Franta’s former girlfriend Věra (Klára Melíšková) jumps on the bandwagon. She even ends up marrying the Nazi radio station overseer Tomek (Richard Stanke).

The Nazi race laws result in the withdrawal of Hana’s film from cinemas, and she must lie low at home. In a sense, Emil, jealous of his wife’s success and her attractive middle-aged (and Jewish) costar Arnošt Fantl (Jíří Ornest), is guiltily relieved. Hana discovers a secret new life when she starts sneaking out during the day to private film screenings with Petr (Thomás Mechácek), a former doctor who works in a morgue, a morphine-addicted cinephile.

This story imitates life, shot in the muted colors of yesteryear with snippets of Gershwin. There also is a haunting, original McCartneyesque period song that serves as the film’s theme, Když zavřu oči (‘If I close my eyes’ which the subtitles render ‘Like Alice in Wonderland’), by screenwriter Robert Geisler/music by Jan Budař.

Emil increasingly becomes beholden to the successive chain of concessions he finds himself compelled to make, hand-in-hand with Hana’s willful blindness.

The marriage frays along with Emil’s role as Hana’s ‘protector’ as each is led unto temptation. They struggle to keep things that could never be the same the way they always were, down to the film’s surprisingly abrupt resolution.

Meet acute

Jerichow 2008 Germany (91 minutes) written and directed by Christian Petzold.

This is not life-affirming, hardy-har-har, two-GREAT-BIG-thumb’s-way-up family entertainment. But it’s not a bad movie, either.

What director Christian Petzold has done here is to strip down The Postman Always Rings Twice to its James M. Cainian fundamentals and set it in Jerichow, a depressed rural backwater of post-unification former East Germany about sixty miles west of Berlin. 

We hear bells toll as the opening credits roll in white on a black background. After the action begins, we gather that these bells toll for the mother of our protagonist, Thomas (Benno Fürmann), because Thomas is leaving the cemetery where his mother just has been buried.

Gather is all we need do: as Mr. Donne advised, it is never necessary (and in this story clearly not advisable) to ask for whom the bells toll.

Someone with a henchman is waiting for Thomas outside the cemetery. Leon (André T. Hennicke), evidently Thomas’ business partner, is an affluent German from the west who had loaned Thomas €1,000. Thomas apparently ‘left town’ without telling anyone.

We subsequently learn that Thomas is a former Bundeswehr soldier who served in a combat role in Afghanistan, but was dishonorably discharged from the service for undisclosed reasons. But there does not seem to be much mystery here. One gets the sense that rather than a dark secret or unspeakable act, Thomas just happened to be in the right place at the wrong time and ‘one day the axe just fell.’

Out on his ass—again. Thomas is alone, back in his childhood home: no money, prospects, no future.

Then Ali Özkan (Hilmi Sözer) drives into his life in a Range Rover blasting Turkish popular music.

Ali, the assimilated, middle-aged son of gastarbeiters, made good in Germany. He owns a chain of 45 snack bars, a kind of an immigrant ‘Döner Sultan’—roadside kiosks that sell ethnic food. He lives within walking distance of Thomas. He also has a drinking problem. This brings him into contact with Thomas, whom he hires as his driver after he loses his license for driving while intoxicated.

Ali also has a wife. Laura (Nina Hoss), an attractive, tall, blonde German woman no longer young—younger than Ali, roughly Thomas’ age—helps run his business. Laura evidently was headed nowhere on skids when she and Ali met in a bar where she worked. Ali ‘redeemed’ her, but keeps her in the gilded cage of a prenuptial agreement which states that if she leaves him, she reassumes responsibility for the €142,000 debt she carried when they met.

Ali seems to sense that Laura and Thomas are as though made for one another. Made for one another, yet one dimensional: they are creatures of blind appetite rather than fertile imagination, flies intoxicated by free air as they bumble helplessly against the sheer nylon screen of Ali’s largesse.

James M. Cain might be smiling somewhere.

Petzold brings a new element to this story though. Hilmi Sözer’s Ali is a fuller, richer character than his [Greek] predecessors, and his view is told through the lyrics of the Turkish music he listens to—the film’s only music, besides the doleful cello music that characterizes the fruitless lives and disappointments of Thomas and Laura. 

It is too bad that the song lyrics do not get subtitles, because they speak directly for Ali’s state of mind.

After Ali’s brief drive-by audio introduction, we see him at the beach during an outing with Thomas and Laura singing along with Gülşen Bayraktar’s Nazar değmesin (May misfortune—i.e., the evil eye—not spite the happiness of my love), dancing drunkenly in the sand with a bottle of vodka.

Although the Baltic Sea is at least 100 miles/160 km from Jerichow (and the North Sea farther yet west), the beach outings and chalk cliffs are lovely locations—and of course critical to the story.

Dancing and singing against a background that feels as though it takes him back to his long-ago home near the eastern Mediterranean, Ali cannot understand why the setting and music does not move his friend Thomas. Thomas says that Ali reminds him of Zorba the Greek. Ali puts on Sezen Aksu’s pop love song Sen ağlama (Don’t you cry) and makes ‘der Deutsche Thomas’ and Laura dance as he stumbles off to get more vodka.

Laura and Thomas will deceive Ali, but it is as though Ali expects them to. He seems pained less by their deceit than by their desperation and limited imagination, these people who would be his ‘betters.’

As Ali tells his wife: ‘I live in a country that doesn’t want me with a wife that I bought.’

But as the desperately unhappy Laura later needlessly tells the equally unhappy Thomas, ‘You can’t love if you don’t have money. That’s something I know.’

Ali’s decision ends the story. As the credits roll, we hear Turkish pop diva Nilüfer Yumlu’s Karar verdim (I decided), which starts roughly like this:

‘I decided to forget/I decided to leave/I want to get far away from here/Get you out of my mind/I wish I could be happy like a child./ I decided to forget you/I decided to leave you/No one before/No one in my life/Hurt me as much as you have’ etc.

(‘Karar verdim unutmaya/Karar verdim ayrılmaya/Çekip gitsen buradan/Gitsem çok uzaklara /Çocuk gibi mutlu olsam./ Karar verdim unutmaya seni/Karar verdim ayrılmaya/Daha önce hiç kimse/Hayatımda hiç kimse/Senin kadar incitmedi böyle…’)

The full lyrics can be found online, with fair-to-fairly-wobbly translations here and there.

Genre bender

Celda 211 (Cell 211) 2009 Spain (111 minutes) cowritten and directed by Daniel Monzón, based on the novel of the same title by Francisco Pérez Gandul.

This is a fast-paced thriller set amid a prison riot, but it is also an engaging character study of half a dozen disparate people whose lives are affected by this event and a mordant comment on the ‘security state.’

This movie means business. In a short, wordless prologue before the title appears, we see an inmate improvise a cutting edge from plastic that he uses to slash his wrists the right way: deep cuts along the forearms, not ‘plea for help’ scratches across the wrists.

The story opens with a nice-looking young man in a jacket and tie walking through a decrepit maximum security prison with two uniformed senior guards. The set is the former Spanish regional prison at Zamora, north of Salamanca in western Spain, closed thirteen years before the shoot; many of the extras are former prisoners.

Juan Oliver (Alberto Ammanin), a new hire scheduled to start the next day, has come a day early to orient himself and meet his new colleagues in order to make a good first impression and to hit the ground running on his first day.

Juan is thirty years old, happily married, and his wife, Elena (Marta Etura), is six months pregnant; we see their life together in flashbacks. The couple moved to Zamora for Juan’s job.

Two guards, Armando Nieto (Fernando Soto) and Germán (Félix Cubero), give Juan—and the viewer—the quick-and-dirty lowdown about the prison, the inmates, and how the system works.

‘Never trust any of them,’ Armando says. ‘Never forget where you are, and look them in the eye. Never let them see you are scared.’

‘In the eye,’ adds German, ‘but watch their hands. They’re like magicians. Nothing here, nothing there, and presto!’ he says, pulling out a spoon.

These and other details of Juan’s brief introduction soon become critically important. In a quick succession of random events, Juan goes from being a curious observer to one in a mob of rioting prisoners.

The ‘Cell 211’ of the title is the site of the prologue; it is also where Juan awakes after a blow to the head, and needs to start thinking very quickly to stay alive.

The top dog is Malamadre (Luis Toser), a bald, bearded and tattooed lifer who looks like an American outlaw biker. Malamadre’s henchmen are his ‘right hand man’ Tachuelo (Vincente Romero) and Apache (Carlos Bardem, brother of Javier), who ‘controls the Colombians.’

Malamadre started looking for his moment when he heard through the prison grapevine that the government was quietly holding three members of the militant Basque separatist group ETA in a prison wing. Malamadre’s plan is to use these high profile political prisoners as hostages to force the government to improve prison conditions.

Jon Arteago ‘Potolo’ (Patxi Bisquert) an ETA militant sentenced to 1,200 years for seven murders and an attempted kidnapping, warns Malamadre: ‘If any of you lays a finger on us, you can kiss your whole family goodbye.’

‘You might be doing me a favor,’ Malamadre replies. ‘My only family is my cousin in La Coruña, and he’s a fucking prick.’

Juan is a problem for the inmates because he is not socialized to the prison. He is too ‘normal’. They do not recognize him as a guard, and he does not feel to them like a guard or a con. But he has balls. Malamadre and the other prisoners are impressed by his pluck as much by his physical endowment (they made him strip). Malamadre laughingly nicknames him ‘Calzones.’ His henchmen distrust and envy Juan.

Juan is no less a problem for prison authorities. A cherry guard, a regular, and three high profile politicals are inside. In Madrid, the Minister of the Interior dispatches a company of SWAT commandos and insists that there will be no negotiation with prisoners. The president’s office is anxious that the Basques be extracted unharmed.

It does not take long for the Spanish and international broadcast media to show up at the prison gates demanding answers—the media and the public, including pregnant Elena, who cannot contact her husband or get a straight answer from his employers.

The prison riot is portrayed as a product of a repressive and illegal system; the atmosphere outside the gates also turns ugly. Straightforward, truthful answers are not forthcoming when the powers that be do not really want to know or hear the truth themselves.

This is where the genre gets bent to political commentary, as in the films of the Brazilian José ‘Zé’ Padilha.

The president and interior minister do not want to look bad. José Roca, the warden (Manuel Solo), acts as though he can see his whole career and political life passing before his eyes. He does not have to—nor want to—know that unseemly things go on to ensure the smooth operation of his facility.

Armando, the head of the guards, one of the men who told Juan about how the system works on his tour, braces for a rough landing. And José Utrilla (Antonio Rasines), a carry-over from the old regime (Franco’s time), stands ready to bust an informer’s gut or crack a protester’s head if he or his superiors needed something done.

Thus, Juan must rely on his cool and quick wits. Malamadre is a tough con who has nothing to lose, and appreciates Juan’s heart, his brains and his cool. Their friendship is the center of this story.

Romance and magic

Pépé le Moko 1937 France Lumière (94 minutes) cowritten and directed by Julien Duvivier based on the novel by Henri La Barthe [as Détective Ashelbé, a pseudonym based on the French novelist’s initials HLB].

This French classic is magic. Every shot and frame of the 1937 film Pépé le Moko shows that French director Julien Duvivier knew how to make a good movie.

In this instance Duvivier achieved more than that. He struck on the formula for creating the magical look and atmosphere of that surreal black-and-white land of which a middle-aged Hollywood B-picture actor soon would become king.

The formula goes something like this: a charismatic, streetwise middle-aged man, a lovely young woman, and a supporting cast of louche if not criminal eccentrics mix in an improbable potboiler detective plot set in an exotic place.

The sets are sumptuous and alluring; in this instance, orientalist art deco with palms and ‘natives’ in fezzes and djellabas. Expressionistic lighting and camera angles heighten the drama. A western orchestra sways to an eastern flute. The camera swans from shot to shot, episode to episode, from one beautiful image to the next as though in a dream. Things happen ‘and then,’ following the patterns of dreams rather than the more prosaic rationales of quotidian life. The protagonist’s dreamlike ‘anxiety’ is that he is trapped in this place. 

Sounds a bit like Casablanca (1942), doesn’t it?

Duvivier reportedly took his cue from Howard Hawk’s Scarface (1932), refashioned here in the so-called French ‘poetic realism’ style with the beautiful Jean Gabin rather than the demonic Paul Muni. United Artists in turn dutifully remade Pépé le Moko in Hollywood as Algiers (1938) with Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr. Warner Brothers took a flier on Humphrey Bogart in the war propaganda/romance set in American expatriate Rick Blaine’s eponymous saloon in Casablanca.

A goofy aspect of Duvivier’s makeover is that George Raft’s signature coin-flipping in Scarface became le Moko henchman Jimmy (Gaston Modot) playing with a bilbo catcher—a child’s game that involves catching a ball on a stick. Le Moko’s other henchman, Max (Roger Legris), wears a permanently dopey grin that suggests he has had no trouble finding kif. 

The ‘romance’ of the genre, such as it is, slips through a door left ajar by an improbable plot: hard-bitten characters who purport to be motivated by self-interest or greed turn out to have airier, loftier, even irrational turns of mind that make the ending all but impossible to guess.     

Will le Moko risk capture and a long prison term for love by leaving the Kasbah? Who will lay hands on the priceless ‘black bird’ (The Maltese Falcon, 1941), the ‘letters of transit’ authorizing exit to neutral Portugal from Vichy-ruled Morocco (Casablanca), or turn up the long-lost son-in-law (The Big Sleep, 1946)? Sometimes even the director and screenwriter did not know until the end; often they shot alternative endings.

Woody Allen beautifully recreates a fan’s longing to inhabit this magical kingdom, the protagonist’s wish to escape it, and a filmmaker’s desire to capture it, in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985).

Standing on its own, Pépé le Moko may be a perfect movie because it tells its story as artfully and efficiently as a dream. 

Jean Gabin plays the notorious French criminal of the title who eludes police by taking refuge in the storied Kasbah of Algiers, the native quarter of one of France’s then colonial cities, where he lives like a pasha with his outlaw gang.

The sobriquet ‘le Moko’ refers to people from the French Mediterranean seaport Toulon, where speakers of Occitan dialects such as Provençal which preceded French used expressions such as es como co rather than the French c'est comme ça (that’s the way it is), or em’ aco? rather than et avec ça? (and with that?). This prompted the French from outside the region to call the locals ‘moco’s.’

But this Pépé evidently became ‘le Moko’ when he got away with ‘two million’ in a Toulon heist in which he used machine guns. Moreover, one of le Moko’s key dramatic vulnerabilities in this story is his homesickness for Paris, the city he claims as his home.

He traffics in stolen jewelry and has no qualms using a handgun, though his ‘thieves’ honor’ or ‘sporting nature’ has him shoot pursuing policemen in the legs only, to warm them off by laming but not killing them. This probably is not a good plan against a modern SWAT team, and may have been far-fetched for le Moko’s time.

Le Moko is middle-aged, but dashing; he has flair and panache. Duvivier’s camera makes Gabin glow.

A chance encounter brings him in contact with Gisèle ‘Gaby’ Gould (Mireille Balin), the beautiful young mistress of the wealthy and much older Maxime Kleep, ‘of Kleep Champagnes’ (Charles Granval). Gaby, a younger associate of Kleep’s and that associate’s mistress are French tourists slumming in the native quarter. 

Le Moko and Gaby fall in love—he more with her. Le Moko sparks her romantic imagination and she feeds his homesickness for Paris and his desire to leave the Kasbah.

The wily native Inspecteur Slimane (Lucas Gridoux) plays on le Moko’s love and homesickness to try to draw him out of the quarter to arrest him. If le Moko leaves the Kasbah, can he elude the police dragnet? Will Gaby leave her sugar daddy to share le Moko’s uncertain but beguilingly romantic future?

Balin, a popular actress in the 1930s who starred opposite Gabin in this film as well as Gueule d'amour [Lady Killer] (1937), apparently came close to her own poetic realist end.

She continued to work in German-occupied Paris, where she fell in love with Birl Desbok, a German Army officer. She and Desbok fled the city shortly before the Allies crossed the Seine in August 1944, but free French forces caught them in the south the next month. Desbok likely was executed. Balin, banned as a collaborator from working in the film industry for a year after the war, made only one more film.