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Michael Brooke admires this first colour film by Czech master director František Vlacil. Delineating the course of an often wordless romance, it tells an emotional tale of two lovers trapped in the march of history.

Up to now, the Czech master František Vláčil's British reputation has derived exclusively from his widescreen medieval epics Marketa Lazarová and Valley of the Bees, but Adelheid - an intense, low-key chamber piece, is actually more typical of the bulk of his work. Set in northern Moravia (i.e. the former Sudetenland) just after the end of World War II, it concerns a brief, often wordless romance between Viktor (Petr Čepek, Valley's saturnine star), a former RAF officer determined to ignore politics as much as possible, and Adelheid, a woman who initially seems to be an innocent victim of widespread anti-German prejudice. With no common language, Viktor has to piece together Adelheid's life from visual clues and mementos (photographs, letters), in the process discovering that she's a much more morally ambiguous character than he first imagined. The film earned Vláčil a lengthy break from the cinema after the Communist authorities took exception to his complex, troubling portrait of Czech-German relations - especially the suggestion that the Czechs weren't necessarily as magnanimous in victory as the official version liked to pretend.

 

Michael Brooke on 28th July 2010
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