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If nothing else, Vladimír Michálek’s crotchety paean to the waning of the light serves as a corrective to such Hollywood sop on the topic as the recent Secondhand Lions. Fanda (Vlastimil Brodsky) might be a grumpy old man, but he has the kind of dark, puckish Slavic humor that made the Czech New Wave so appealing in the ’60s before the Soviet tanks shut it down. Lately he and his pal Eda (Stanislav Zindulka) have been passing themselves off as wealthy foreign investors to realtors so the latter will wine and dine them in an attempt to sell them derelict estates and other property. It’s all fun and games until they get caught and Fanda’s no-nonsense wife, Emílie (Stella Zázvorková), and ungrateful son, Jára (Ondrej Vetchy), decide it’s time to resettle him in a home — which will allow Jára to grab dad’s apartment to house his ex-wife. The dialectic referred to in the English title comes down to a conflict between an old-fashioned attitude of romantic fancifulness and a new-fangled bottom line of private property — nostalgia, perhaps, for the socialism with a human face of the Prague Spring of 1968. Certainly Brodsky’s nuanced performance evokes those times, and though it might be softer around the edges than his classic turn in Jirí Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains (1966), it’s a fitting farewell (the terminally ill Brodsky committed suicide shortly after the film’s release). In Czech with English subtitles. (98 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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