E-Mail This Article to a Friend Bounced Czechs Up and Down settles for the latter BY GERALD PEARY

Living as I do in sour, pissed-off, puritanical Boston, I marveled at Sydney, Australia, a smiling, easy-going city where the predominant Irish-Catholicism translates into immense gay-pride parades, easy access to abortion, methadone clinics everywhere, and topless beaches where nobody obsesses about exposed female nipples. So I well understand the impulse of Jan Hrebejk, the Czech filmmaker of Up and Down (opening next Friday, April 8, at the Kendall Square) to romanticize utopian Australia in the face of the rampant racism in his own post-Communist country. On the one hand, a Czech émigré in Brisbane booting a soccer ball on the sunny beach with his half-Aboriginal son; on the other, a Prague soccer club of middle-aged skinhead types spewing scatological verbiage at a foreign, and black, soccer player on TV. We also get Czech street criminals attacking an aging Asian couple at the river and a sensible, educated middle-aged woman, after several glasses of wine, railing against Gypsies, Romanians, and Slovaks in her slum neighborhood.

Hrebejk, who made the well-received Holocaust-period film Divided We Fall, is concerned about the racism that’s permeating his country. His wife worked for Amnesty International, and he gave former Czech president Václav Havel a cameo in Up and Down because of Havel’s welcoming support of foreign dissidents. But standing on the appropriate side of a key issue hardly guarantees a good picture. Although Up and Down was the Czech Republic’s PC Oscar selection this year and has been picked up for American distribution by Sony Classics, I can’t say that it works, except in spurts. Heed the title: up and down. As the narrative becomes increasingly offputting, the repetitive attacks on racism lose their credence. They come off as shrill and self-hating putdowns of today’s Czech Republic, as boring abroad as they must be alienating at home.

Up and Down starts promisingly, as a Czech truck sneaks its way across the Czech-Slovak border with a heavy load of Third World immigrants whom they unceremoniously drop along the highway before driving off unconcerned. But what’s that sound coming from the hold? It’s an infant! Two Truckers and a Baby? It’s an old, old story, brusque he-men turning ga-ga as they nurture a bambino: I recall several Hollywood versions of Peter Kyne’s Three Godfathers, a sentimental Western tale of rowdy cowboys with a cherub in arms.

But Up and Down transports the baby into the home of a somewhat cuckoo Prague woman, Mila (Natasa Burger), who wants a child so desperately that she’s willing to buy this one from fencers. Her husband, Franta (Jirí Machácek), agrees to parent it. He’s a bullet-headed, slow-tongued muscle man who’s served a jail sentence for hooliganism, going wild as a fan of the Sparta Prague soccer team. But the baby seems to calm him down, humanize him.

Did I mention the baby is dark-skinned? Franta imagines a diminutive version of Brazilian soccer superstar Ronaldo. Isn’t all this enough for a movie? No, we’re thrust without explanation into a complicated second story. A late-60ish university professor, Oto (Jan Tríska), falls sick while lecturing, and the next attack could prove fatal. It’s time to take account of his life with a family reunion, only he’s got two families. Two decades ago, he abandoned his wife and son and took up with a younger woman with whom he had a daughter. Everybody together! His ex-wife, Vera (Emília Vásáryová), whom he never divorced. His estranged son, Martin (Peter Forman, son of iconic Czech director Milos Forman), who must come from Australia. His live-in girlfriend, Hana (Ingrid Timková), who works in a refugee camp. His daughter, Lenka (the gorgeous Kristýna Liska-Boková), who seems to be in this movie because . . . she’s gorgeous!

The above sit at a table and talk, talk, talk. Then we cut back to Franta at home with a racist soccer-fan buddy, and talk, talk, talk. Up and Down is floundering! Ultimately, the two stories are brought together through a pickpocketing incident involving both sets of characters. Huh? Not enough reason. Up and Down should have been two movies, or, better, one movie, dropping altogether the laborious professor’s tale. But without a Czech summoned from Australia, how would Hrebejk have managed to show how much better things are Down Under?

Contact Gerald Peary at gpeary@geraldpeary.com