FILM-FORWARD.COMReviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
UP AND DOWN
One night near the Czech-Slovak border, two smugglers discover that
their truckload of illegal South Asian immigrants have left behind a baby. The abandoned infant
is eventually sold to a childless couple,
Mila (Natasa Burger) and Franta (Jiri Machacek), leading them into a
life of dangerous secrecy with their dark-skinned child.
After the aging bourgeois professor
Otto (Jan Triska) collapses while teaching, he finally
decides to contact his estranged son Martin (Petr Forman),
who has been living in Australia for 20 years. Martin agrees to go back to Prague and also
convinces his mother, Otto’s embittered wife Vera (Emilia
Vasaryova), to come along. With both gravity and humor, the film
brings the family Otto had once abandoned with the one he has taken up
in exchange - his new companion Hana (Ingrid Timkova), a worker in a
refugee aid center, and their teenage daughter Lenka (Kristyna Liska-Bokova).
Whether it is the threat of Nazi occupation in 2000’s Divided We Fall or the
class conflict between immigrants and natives in Up and Down,
writers Jan Hrebejk and Petr Jarchovsky derive drama out of
claustrophobic households. As in Divided We Fall, it
is the infant - representative of rebirth in a disparate nation - that
churns the fates.
For his first contemporary film, the
cinematography and narrative style of Up and Down are a departure for
Hrebejk. The intricate plot that ultimately connects the
two families and the bleak shots of urban life
tinted in blue are evocative of such films as Traffic or even 21
Grams.
This new style, however, deters the rich, leisurely encounters that
allows the viewer to undeniably feel for the delightful
characters in Divided We Fall. Yet this disparity and bleakness may be exactly what the
film seeks to
portray. A resolution for the characters in Up
and Down is impossible; their only choice is to continue as is. Marie Iida
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