Pupendo - Jan Hřebejk

Bedrich è un grande artista, uno scultore che fa la fame, una moglie che lo ama davvero, due bambini, di cui uno sordo.
la sua colpa è quella di aver sostenuto la Primavera di Praga, e gliela hanno fatta pagare, la libertà e la coerenza non sono gratis.
poi incontra un barbone, che ospita a casa, Bedrich è un uomo buono, e indovinate chi è quel barbone?
mica ve lo dico.
di Jan Hrebejk è arrivato al cinema The teacher, solo quest'anno.
buona visione - Ismaele

…This movie is a comedy-drama about the 1980s in Czechoslovakia, and that little joke sums up the Czech perspective pretty well. Yes, we're living in crap, but nonetheless it's home. The story follows a talented Prague artist, Bedrich Mara, who in the heady years around the 1968 Prague Spring was one of the top artists in the country with his work shown in the west. But he refused to make the necessary compromises (join the communist party presumably) and has fallen out of favor with the authorities. He loses his job, is ostracized from the art community, and barely brings home enough for his family by making kitschy clay things, like a money bank that looks like a butt. The movie tells the story of a summer in which on a bit of a lark, he brings home a bum. The bum turns out to be an art historian caught at a particularly low point. And through a bitter-sweet series of events, he helps Bedrich return to the international art world -- although at costs that have a certain black humor to them…

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…A slice of life as seen by the director during the pre-Velvet Revolution days, the film, much like most Czech films made in the period following communism, presents the picture of an intelligentsia desperately yearning for change. It remains a popular subject for Czechs to this day, and the film duly obliges. But it is also a breezy, well made comedy that directly addresses its audience – one of the reasons for its box office success. While I couldn’t yet make a connection between the film’s title – alluding to a prank game played using a coin, and the film’s context, it is nevertheless entertaining, and Recommended Viewing..!

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…As with his previous two films, Hrebejk and scripter Petr Jarchovsky (who share a “film by” credit) mix dark humor and grim drama in equal measure. Pic’s title comes from the childish prank of slapping a heavy coin on the bare stomach of a victim who has been promised something pleasurable, a startling, if tenuous, metaphor for Socialism’s illusion of stability and prosperity that morphed into the sting of repression.

So too, the rigidity of life at the time is spoofed at every turn, though much of the humor is so insular as to be puzzling to an outsider.

Pitched firmly between the dramatic depths of his perf as the rural priest in Vladimir Michalik’s “Forgotten Light” and the manic country bumpkin of Vera Chytilova’s “The Inheritance,” Polivka’s characterization is neither fish nor fowl, befitting the odd tenor of the times but making his character difficult to grasp…

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…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…

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