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Taking the cinema cure at Karlovy Vary
BY GERALD PEARY
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Goethe went to Karlovy Vary, not Casablanca, for the curative waters, and so did Karl Marx, where he penned bits of Das Kapital by the Europe-renowned spas. Every 19th-century composer worth his salt — Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Grieg, Wagner, Brahms, Dvorák — took some time out at Karlovy Vary (German name Carlsbad). In the 20th century, Nazis on horseback occupied the cobblestone streets, "freeing" Czechoslovakia, and the Communists grabbed control after World War II, making Karlovy Vary a beloved politburo vacation spot a convenient two hours from Prague. In 1965, a film fest was started there, but its liberalization ended with the Prague Spring of 1968. The fest stumbled on for several decades, run by party hacks. Even after the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the Karlovy Vary Film Festival was in disarray from all those debilitating Communist years. "In 1994, we prepared to revitalize the good name of the Karlovy Vary Festival, which had been battered after years of stagnation during the former regime," recalls Eva Zaoralová, the artistic director for the last 10 years. "Wherever we turned, people shook their heads in disbelief. ‘The festival has no future in Karlovy Vary.’ " But a rival fest in Prague failed after two years. Bit by bit, Karlovy Vary gained a foothold not only in the Czech Republic (people come from everywhere for the fest, including hundreds of backpacking students) but around the world. In 2003, in its 38th incarnation, the Karlovy Vary Film Festival can make a legitimate claim to being the best in Eastern Europe. Almost 250 features were shown this mid July, including inspiring retrospectives (Maurice Pialat, Yasujiro Ozu), screenings of this year’s interesting output of Czech films, showings of about a dozen recent American indies, and, ahead of all US fests, a display of the most acclaimed works from May’s Cannes Film Festival. It was here that I saw Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, which won Cannes’s two most coveted jury prizes, the Palme d’Or for Best Film and the commendation for Best Director. In the off-year of Cannes 2003, Van Sant’s take on the massacre at Columbine — he transferred the murderous events to an unnamed liberal high school in his home town of Portland, Oregon — seemed as worthy of these awards as any work in Competition. Elephant is gorgeously shot in long, long takes as it follows various kids through the maze of high-school hallways, and the non-professional student ensemble is just fine talking real-life, middle-class, high-school-speak. A constant in Van Sant’s œuvre (My Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, etc.) has been his affection for young people, and it shows here in how relaxed his teenagers are before the camera. It’s typical day at school; the conversations do not portend a massacre. Even our duo of killers are pretty subdued about what’s about to explode, beginning with chowing down a normal breakfast. As one says to the other as they pull out their rifles at the school yard, "Whatever you do, have fun!" As if they were a team hitting the basketball court. The movie’s title? It’s the animal in everyone’s living room that we choose not to notice. In other words: repression. Why nice boys from a nice neighborhood kill. Also, blind people touching various parts of an elephant will describe it in totally different ways. That’s how Van Sant looks at the high-school shoot-out, from the at-variance POV vantages of different students, depending where they are about the school. For some, it’s only an odd explosive noise in the background; for others, it’s the perplexing sight of fellow students in shock running past them; for still others, it’s a rifle pointing in their faces. Several of the new Czech features I saw were set in the 1980s, and they showed how Communism ground down the spirit of stubborn alternative-minded artists, poets, and sculptors. (But the Czech geography didn’t help: gloomy characters tended to whine about living in a country without a seashore.) An acidic satire, Jan Kraus’s Small Town showed a Dogpatch-like Czech village switching in 1989 from drunken Communism to debauched porno capitalism. Some Secrets, Alice Nellis’s funny, warm, contemporary tale of a problem-laden family on an auto trip to Slovakia, seems ripe for American distribution.
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