Up and Down - Palm Beach Post

'Up and Down': Unbalanced, often compelling pastiche

By HAP ERSTEIN
Palm Beach Post

Up and Down, the title of this year's submission by the Czech Republic for the foreign-language film Oscar, probably refers to the fluctuating fates of the diverse characters in contemporary Prague.

But it is also an apt description of the quality of the storytelling, which ranges from compelling to clumsy.

Sony Pictures Classics

'Up and Down'

B-

The verdict: Difficult modern life in post-Communist Czech Republic, as seen in a series of personal, interconnected stories.

Director: Jan Hrebejk
Starring: Petr Forman, Emilia Vasaryova and Jan Triska
Run time: 108 minutes
Release date: February 25, 2005
Rating: R for language, sexual content and brief violence.
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Director Jan Hrebejk (maker of Divided We Fall, set in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia) paints a large canvas portrait of his struggling, post-Communist country, with a vast cast of characters whose connections to each other often do not become known until late in the film. In that sense, you could think of Up and Down as the Czech version of a Robert Altman movie, but with an underlying political theme of the difficulties of life in today's Eastern Europe.

The movie grabs attention quickly as two low-level crooks drive a truck with illegal immigrants through the Czech border checkpoint. Their conversation is both grisly and comic as they discuss disgusting things they have eaten, including a fast-food delicacy of fried bat.

When the immigrants scatter to begin their new lives in the turmoil of the Czech Republic, however, they leave behind a tiny baby. The driver and his sidekick know they can drop the child off at a black market electronics store, where it will be sold like a VCR.

Sure enough, a mournful, emotionally needy woman named Mila (Natasa Burger), whom we watch unsuccessfully trying to abduct a baby at a carnival, soon plunks down her household savings to buy the baby.

Her husband, Franta (Jiri Machacek), a former soccer rowdy, has enough of a police record to rule out a legitimate adoption. While he objects to this instant route to fatherhood — and to the baby's brown skin color — he soon adjusts to the expansion of his family, which he knows could end with a knock on the door.

Their squalor is contrasted by the relative affluence and interpersonal conflict of the family of revered college professor Otto (Jan Triska). When he develops a brain tumor, his son Martin (Petr Forman, son of acclaimed Czech filmmaker Milos Forman), flies in from Australia, where he has been estranged from his father for the past 20 years. First he reunites with his mother, Vera (Emilia Vasaryova), whom Otto left for an attractive, blonde human-rights activist, Hana (Ingrid Timkova), who just happens to be a former girlfriend of Martin's. Needless to say, their collective meeting is tense, made more so by the clash of political attitudes, typified by Vera's bigoted outbursts.

Director Hrebejk, who co-wrote the screenplay with Petr Jrachovsky, casts a critical eye to the class struggle and the struggle for survival in his country. Conditions are tough and people grow desperate and distrustful of others, particularly the encroaching hordes of immigrants who strain the nation's meager resources.

Although Up and Down offers a glimmer of hope for what lies ahead, it is hardly an optimistic view of Czech life.