Kolya

DVD Extras

• Behind the scenes featurette.

Film Details

Cast

Zdenek Sverak, Andrej Chalimon

Technical Details

Star Review

The Oscar success of Jan Sverak's genial parable meant that Znedek Sverak and Andrej Chalimon were instantly installed alongside Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan (The Kid, 1921) and Philippe Noiret and Salvatore Cascio (Cinema Paradiso, 1988) among cinema's most endearing cross-generational odd couples. Some have asserted that this proven combination of cranky and cute was calculatingly concocted to seduce both the notoriously soft-centred Academy electorate and Arthouse's less exacting patrons. But, this story of a fiftysomething Czech cellist who finds common ground with a five year-old Russian refugee also has plenty to say about personal and political commitment.
The third Czech feature to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film has much in common with its predecessors, Jan Kadar and Elmer Klos's Shop on the High Street (1965) and Jiri Menzel's Closely Observed Trains (1966), in that it centres on an outsider trying to make the best of adversity. All three also deal with resistance (of a peculiarly passive variety), with the former's anti-Nazi despair contrasting with the sense of impending liberation that existed in the days before the Velvet Revolution. Consequently, Kolya is easily the sunniest of the trio, with its proud Prague vistas, shameless sentimentality and optimistic conviction that a womanising rebel whose brushes with authority once justified his existence can now comfortably conform with an innocent exiled from the land of his former enemy.
There's an undoubted rosy romanticism about Louka's situation - viz. his atmospheric belltower residence, the unstinting cameraderie of his fellow musicians and his luck in consistently encountering doltish officials. But the episodic structure ensures that the action is never cloying and allows a genuine bond gradually to emerge between Sverak Sr. and young Chalimon. Back in 1997, there was talk of a Hollywood remake, but, thankfully, it never materialised and we're left with this cosily subversive original.

David Parkinson on 15th January 2005

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Film Description

Set in Prague, down on his luck cellist Frantisek Louka is forced to marry a Russian woman in return for money to pay his debts. When she runs off to her lover, he's left with her 5 year-old son Kolya. Moving, clever and beautiful, it won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for best foreign film.

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