[Home] [Links] [CultureDose.com]



Read this review and discuss it at CultureDose.com!

Title: Adelheid
By: František Vlácil
Released by: Facets Video
Released on: 1969
Rating (out of 10): 8
Date: 03/13/2002

Emma Cerna, Petr Cepek

Hopeless Love and Eternal Hatred in post-WWII Czechoslovakia

In 1968 the Soviets rolled over Czechoslovakia, crushing the satellite country's fledgling art movement. Caught in the grip of tanks in the streets and government control of the Media, Czechoslovakia meekly returned to the fold, leaving unseen by the outside world an entire Independent New Wave film era. Lately, with the Soviet Union no more, these films from the 60s have resurfaced and are making their way out of Czechoslovakia to the outside world. One of the recently released efforts is Adelheid.

Adelheid screams, "This is ART!" over and over again. It can get a bit wearing, this obvious pleading to be taken seriously in a film world that at the time included competition like Fellini, Antonioni, and Truffant. No, it isn't good enough to find a place alongside those directors' best works, but Adelheid is a decent film and one worth seeing, both for its leading lady and as a representation of an interesting film movement that should have had a chance to develop further, but didn't.

After various misadventures with the Czech police, who think he might be an escaping German, a young Czech lieutenant (who's spent most of WWII in Scotland) arrives at the looted and now-abandoned mansion of a terrible Nazi. (The Nazi is now on trial for War Crimes.) The Lieutenant's job is to caretake the place and catalogue all the many books left behind by the looters. He's assigned from the POW camp a serving woman named Adelheid, with whom he almost immediately falls in love. She's not having any of that, however, and the remainder of the movie consists of their odd relationship, as he (the employer and victor in the War) tries to please her and gain her acceptance and love—her, the defeated German servant. He controls her physical life, but from the first we see she controls his heart. At the end of it all, he asks if she always hated him; she tells him no, not always, but the look on her face makes it clear that for the first and only time, she's lying to make him feel better.

František Vlácil  seems to have the manic-depressive Czech consciousness of the late 60's down pat. The countryside scenes are vibrant and beautiful, symbolizing the innocence of Czechoslovakia, while the mansion—shot in dull colors and lots of greys—is nearly a character itself; its mood (empty and bitter) reflects not only the residents' outlooks, but the country itself, trapped as it was under Soviet tyranny.

I don't know whether life immediately post-WWII (and late-60s) in Czechoslovakia was really as grey and miserable as Vladimír Körner (the writer) and Víácul have portrayed it. When not filming scenery, their film is dull and grainy yellow-brown. Especially inside the mansion, there's just no color—no spark—to make of it anything more than a cheaply made American 60's horror flick...until the director switches up the game and gets "artsy" about three-quarters of the way through with some stark black-and-white and flashing lights. It's very striking, and it shows how arresting Adelheid could've been with more of these visual effects to break the depressing mood.

The aforementioned scenery, however, is gorgeous. A train chugs through the autumn countryside; we see the leaves, the mountains, sunshine, and all the signs of a peaceful rural life. This plays back and forth against the dreariness of the mansion and life in it, a metaphor for the beauty of Czech life in the good old days before Hitler (and, later, the Soviets), as opposed to the blackness of the lives created by those outside forces.

Driving the intense moods are the two main characters, Viktor and Adelheid. As Viktor, Petr Cepek is extremely handsome and very low-key and soft-spoken, with a great faraway stare. Eventually, however, you realize it's not just an act; this hunk really is as blank slate; in only one scene does he wake up: He's walking through what appears to be a peaceful meadow. The look on his face when a local girl shouts from the edge of the green that it's really a minefield is precious. (Watching him pick his way back through the "meadow" is suspenseful, but Víácul doesn't take advantage of it, cutting away much too quickly for us to be affected by it. Instead, he goes for shock value with the girl's line, "They [the Germans] even put mines under the corpses so we couldn't give them a decent burial. They just laid out here and rotted.")

Emma Cerna is the star here, and the reason you should see Adelheid. Statuesque, with the newer kind of female Eastern European beauty (high cheekbones, sharp eyebrows, and thin nose), this woman is lovely in a strange way. This is beauty made average, accessible. The yellowish lighting, however, doesn't do good things for her already somewhat sallow skin and dishwater blonde hair, and the lack of makeup washes her out even more. Why would you do this to your female romantic lead? Granted, she's supposed to be a servant, but still...

Perhaps in rebellion against repressive Soviet morality, we see shot after shot of Cerna's ass as she bends over at her work. She's got a fine ass, no doubt, but it takes up a lot of time and film. She bends over, he watches hungrily, and we watch him watch her.

Those are the downsides to Cerna; the upsides more than make up for them. Her acting is incredible! She's silent a good part of the film (her German character doesn't speak Czech), and in that silence Cerna shines, playing tired, sullen, bitter, timid—yet still proud. The scene where her employer offers her a pack of good British smokes is spectacular; you feel Adelheid's eagerness warring with bitterness and strength of will. (She accepts the cigarettes and, again, you see her reluctance mixed with pleasure.)

No overacting from her either. One of the toughest acting jobs is to play tipsy, but not smashed. Most people overdo it, coming off blitzed, but Cerna does it perfectly. Her head lolls ever so slightly, her mouth gapes just a little, and her eyes are the right degree of dazed. In another excellent scene (just before they make love for the first time), he asks why she closes her eyes. She doesn't have to say anything; her expression says it all: Her eyes are closed so she doesn't have to see what's happening and what she's become.

There are occasional cliches in the script and in the costumes and makeup. Lines like, "I am a victim of love," can make you cringe with embarrassment for the actors who must say them. There's some backhanded sexism here, too: "A true German woman—keeps up with the men, come what may," is an insult, though it doesn't sound like one at first hearing—For a Czech to refer to anything as "German" at the time was to say that person or object was beneath contempt, so to say a woman who keeps up with men is a German cultural trait is to call all women who keep up with men disgusting.

Here and there are some heavy-handed allegorical references to German aggression. One, a reference to the appeasement which Europe offered the Third Reich in an attempt to avoid the Second World War, stands out as the most vivid—and most direct.
"The table in our kitchen was lime wood. Whey they carved up a pig, it was streaked with blood. But if you scrubbed it with sand, it was white as snow. Our dog used to lie under the table, and I used to throw fatty scraps of meat to her. She was nicer to me then."
Clearly Körner believes Czechoslovakia, along with Poland (another Slav nation), was the pig being carved up, and you can guess which nation is represented by the dog.

As for costumes and makeup, nearly everything is as it should be, so the mistakes stand out. First, there are a few scenes in which Cepek's makeup is so heavy and white he looks like a man dying of malaria. Cerna's costumes aren't a matter of bad so much as out of their time: Good German women certainly didn't wear short skirts and culottes in 1945. Her hair, too, is late 60s long bouffant—a style that wouldn't exist for twenty years after the setting of Adelheid.

As the movie goes on, a strange thing happens: The greyness begins to make sense, and somehow it becomes comforting; you know you couldn't tolerate this much pain and yearning and hatred in full living color. The washed-out look helps us keep a distance between us and these without-an-exception negative events, and František Vlácil's obvious desire to have us see all this as outsiders emphasizes the insular feelings between the characters. You're shut out deliberately to let these people deal with each other one-on-one.

There's no hope here, no happy romantic ending for this least happy and romantic of movies. Helpless love on his part and undying hatred on hers make Adelheid a shivery kind of movie you'll watch with increasing fascination—How can people even live in this never-ending misery with such stoicism?

I must admit that I disliked Adelheid immensely when I watched it the first time. Its mood shook me badly, and the coldness and distance put me off. Had I written this review immediately after that first viewing, I would have been unrelentingly negative in my assessment.

Adelheid has grown on me, though, and after feeling oddly compelled to watch it again, I began to understand it and bridge the gap between myself and these characters and events. I still wouldn't pop it in the VCR as a party movie, but I'll be checking it out again and again, I think, just to peel back its many layers and enjoy the intelligence and care it took to make it. Check it out; it's worth the brain cells and emotional outlay it takes to learn to love it.

© Copyright CultureDose.com 03/13/2002

Buy This on eBay!
 • Look for Adelheid on eBay!
 • Look for František Vlácil on eBay!
 • Look for Facets Video on eBay!
 •  Look for Emma Cerna on eBay!
 •  Look for Petr Cepek on eBay!

Buy This!
 • Buy this from Amazon for $25.99 (VHS)
 &#