FOUR SUNS: A CZECH-FLAVORED TAKE ON INDIE DRAMA

Would it be cynical to note that the local screenings of Bohdan Sláma's (The Country Teacher) latest feature Four Suns are scheduled to arrive just in time for Father's Day?  While the movie certainly doesn't belong to any of the genres (action flicks & westerns among them) usually marketed alongside the holiday, one could easily point to it as a meditation on fatherhood or, more accurately, how to completely mishandle that role.

Fogi (Jaroslav Plesi) is a man in his late 30s with a wife and two kids.  Despite his family obligations, he continues to party without purpose, ignoring the passage of time.  His eldest son Véna (Marek Sácha) is running wild, causing Fogi to worry that his willful case of puer aeternus has set a poor example for his kid; he's right, of course.  Meanwhile, Fogi's long suffering wife Jana (Anna Geislerová) is finding her affections tested by her husband's chronic irresponsible nature. 

While this Czech import plays out very much in the standard indie family drama mode, it does quite a few things well, exploring Fogi's existential crisis through his connections to others.  There's also a quirky and unexpected metaphysical component added to the tale involving stones, trees and the quest for a "master" that adds a lot to the proceedings even if it's hard to take it all that seriously.

Traveling a well-worn path, Four Sons is a well-acted, finely produced film that doesn't offer much new in the realm of family dramas but still manages to tells a compelling story.  It comes across like the hybrid, love child of the early films of Miguel Arteta if they settled down with a slightly lighter version of Mike Leigh's output.  All in all, a very pleasant, if not earth-shattering, film.

Four Suns screens at the NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium (in the Portland Art Museum) as a part of their New Czech Cinema series on Saturday, June 16th at 7pm and Tuesday, June 19th at 7pm.  More info available here.


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Portland International Film Festival preview day 1: SILENT SOULS and KAWASAKI'S ROSE

Monday marked the beginning of press screenings for this year's Portland International Film Festival (PIFF). Two movies a day, five days a week for three weeks equals a lot of films to talk about, so I'll probably only have time to touch on each one lightly before rushing off to check out the next set of screenings each day.

Things fall apart, it’s inevitable.  Our bodies, minds and even our culture are all positioned on a path that leads towards dissolution.  Silent Souls, the new film by Russian director Aleksei Fedorchenko, explores this base fact in a mode typical of Russian cinema, by which I mean that the film is bleak in subject, slow moving and comes off as somewhat emotionally neutral when compared to films we see being produced in the west.  It’s also a visually stunning movie that allows ample time to be fully drawn into the world being depicted.

Silent Souls tells the story of two men, Aist and Miron, on a mission to lie to rest the body of Miron’s wife.  Both men are descendants of the Merjan (or Meryan) people, whose culture was long ago absorbed into the larger Russian society.  Fedorchenko presents the disappearance of their culture and its accompanying rituals as a lens through which we can view the more direct and personal loss felt by these characters, slowly revealing the intersections between these parallel experiences.

Silent Souls is definitely one to catch at the festival, especially if you're a fan of visually rich, Russian cinema. I adored this film.

Silent Souls plays at 6:15pm on Feb. 11th at the Broadway Theater. A second screening is scheduled for 4:45pm on Feb. 13th at the Whitsell Auditorium.

The second film of the day was Kawasaki's Rose (dir. Jan Hrebejk), hailing from the Czech Republic. The story: A well-respected psychiatrist, Pavel, is about be honored for his work before, during and after the Velvet Revolution. The conflict? Well, it turns out that the doctor has a much darker past than most of his family ever imagined. Kawasaki's Rose is a solid film but it does spend a bit too much of its run time establishing characters on the periphery of the central narrative, eventually picking up a great deal of steam as it goes along.  And some of those supporting performances, Antonin Kratochvil's turn as the sculptor Borek, in particular, make it worth catching if you're planning on seeing a wide swath of the programming at this year's festival.

 

Kawasaki's Rose plays at 6pm on Feb. 11th at the Whitsell Auditorium. Additional screenings at the Broadway Theater are at 3:30pm on Feb. 13th and 6:45pm on Feb. 14th.