Tweet

What's the best Czech film ever made? Ask a British film buff and the chances are they'd plump for Closely Observed Trains, or something by Miloš Forman or Jan Švankmajer. But if you ask a Czech (and this was indeed the outcome of a 1998 poll), they'd be far more likely to nominate František Vlácil's Marketa Lazarová. If you've never heard of it, you're in good company: it was passed over for British distribution in 1967 because big-budget widescreen medieval epics didn't fit the accepted wisdom that Czech films were quirky, low-key affairs. By contrast, this is the Czechs' Seven Samurai, their Seventh Seal, their Virgin Spring and their Andrei Rublev, and, remarkably, proves fully worthy of the comparison. Running nearly three hours, it sounds straightforward on paper (essentially, it follows the fortunes of a rebel clan that falls foul of the authorities), but proves anything but in practice. Vlácil's overwhelmingly visual approach, his highly mobile camera often adopting a first-person viewpoint, is bewildering at first, thrusting us back seven centuries and into the middle of a violent confrontation without so much as a by-your-leave. However, as the film progresses, the vast scale of Vlácil's ambition becomes clearer. There's a surfeit of Christian and pagan imagery (with some startlingly erotic sequences that the BBFC of 1967 might have baulked at passing), a constant threat posed by the natural world (the pre-credit sequence shows a pack of wolves running across the snowy wastes), and an overwhelming physicality borne of years of obsessive research (Vlácil even made his cast live like their characters while filming). Marketa herself is the blonde, virginal daughter of the wily merchant Lazar. Although kidnapped by the rebellious Kozlík clan in revenge for her father's activities, her love for Mikoláš Kozlík is genuine - albeit inevitably doomed in a world that fully lives up to Hobbes' despairing definition of men's lives as "nasty, brutish and short". Marketa Lazarová is a thrilling rediscovery, one of the most convincing depictions of the medieval era ever captured on film, and currently the most exciting entry in Second Run's ever-adventurous DVD catalogue.

 

Michael Brooke on 7th November 2007
View all 106 of Michael Brooke's reviews