Viktor Tauš filmed the life story of a strong, charismatic girl from a children’s home in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s based on David Jařab’s script. You can now see the film-explosion of ideas in Czech cinemas.
Premieres by Pavlo Sladký
Orphanage
11:06 a.m. September 27, 2024 Share on Facebook
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Amerikanka is a film that director and producer Viktor Tauš has been preparing for many years. Formally, in a very distinctive, expressive way, it tells about Emma, who grew up in a children’s home.
Tauš has a very specific filmography. The unsuccessful autobiographical debut Canary in 1999 put his career on hold. He bet on commercial, nostalgic audience certainty in 2008 with Sněženká a machry after 25 years. He experienced a production slump with the unsuccessful and absurdly ambitious trilogy Horticulture directed by Jan Hřebejk.
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He co-produced films such as Red Captain or Love, Comrade, and he found space for the realization of his distinctive formal ideas in the television industry with the series Blue Shadows, Aquarius and Traitors. In them, it was as if he gradually added expressive directorial solutions to the cauldron, as he gained confidence with how critics and viewers appreciated his work, as it increasingly deviated from the detective TV routine.
The American woman seems to be completing this stage. According to the director, the subject, derived from personal meetings, was transformed into a screenplay and a book of the same name by David Jařab. Tauš also gave the American several theatrical forms and also recorded the productions.
The stage history can be seen on the American. For a considerable part of the footage, it acts as a theater “site-specific” spectacle with an unmissable scenography by Jan Kadlec, filmed in the wildest possible way by cinematographer Martin Douba.
Klára Kitto in the film American | Photo: Martin Douba | Source: Bioscop
The environment is so intensively stylized that even the use of churches or sports grounds in the series Traitors as locations for criminal and forensic events pales in comparison. Interiors and exteriors are photographed in a distinctive color key, for example in yellow, red or blue-white, which makes it at least partially easier for the audience to orientate themselves in the plot.
The Americana also contains a huge number of film and cultural references. On westerns, the holocaust, Stallone’s Rocky, on the typical “double dolly shot” that made the American director Spike Lee famous, on film expressionism, the circus, shadow theater and dollhouses.
These are just some of the hints I picked up on the first viewing. On top of that, the film uses a split image or perhaps imitates archival documentary footage.
Julie Šoucová in the film Amerikánka | Photo: Martin Douba | Source: Bioscop
The American girl is simply a kaleidoscope and an expressive scream. During it, as the phrase extracted from former advertising says, the entire difficult life of the heroine will pass before our eyes.
“This is me too. I’m looking at another one of my faces,” says the woman, who is represented in three stages of life by three actresses: Pavla Beretová (as an adult), Julie Šoucová (as a teenager) and Klára Kitto (as a child). “A nice greeting,” she was told by various people and institutions, who at the same time often tried to break her neck.
American girl
fantasy drama
Czech Republic, 2024, 108 min
Directed by: Viktor Tauš
Scenario: David Jařab
They play: Pavla Beretová, Julie Šoucová, Klára Kitto, Lucie Žačková, Klára Melíšková, Tomas Sean Pšenička, Magdalena Borová, Vladimír Javorský, Zuzana Mauréry
What disappears in the kaleidoscope are some connections. The young heroine does not speak after being placed in a children’s home. He will start later. Why and what is that turning point almost completely disappears in the film. We will understand it much better from the book. It is also not told linearly, but the story follows quite clearly from the plot full of time jumps.
Similarly, it is in the American girl with adolescence and relationships with other girls in a factory collective, which can act as practice while studying at an apprenticeship, as a shepherd or a problematic first job.
The role of the character played by Václav Neužil probably offers several (contradictory) interpretations. As if the film were offering an adaptation of the original, which it assumes that the audience knows almost as well as the creative team itself.
Klára Melíšková in the film American | Photo: Martin Douba | Source: Bioscop
The creators accompany the American woman with words of admiration about her inspiring steadfastness. “The story of the girl they didn’t get”, reads the film’s tagline.
But at the same time, it is about a woman (and it is a question whether the audience can actually recognize this exactly during the viewing) who, as an adult, was unable to raise her child by herself and entrusted him – with the considerable help of her own mother – to a children’s home. Right into the one in which she herself suffered so much.
Thus, the American woman “prolonged the transgenerational trauma”. In this sense of the word, on the contrary, they just “got” it. When concentrating on the expressiveness and imaginativeness of the images that attack us, it is as if some important meanings are disappearing.
Pavla Beretová in the film Amerikánka | Source: Bioscop
The film features intense moments, such as young Emma’s (and “the other”) emotional monologue in split-screen. Or an artistically and scenographically refined episode with a guardian family in a pink house, full of false care and proclaimed new life opportunities.
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The sequence in which the train station is transformed into an apartment also offers an excellent scenic effect. But at other times, the acting seems stiff or voluntary.
It weakens the intensity of the film’s emotional impact. As a whole, the American woman misses even more universal comprehensibility. The relationship between the pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary reality and the meaning of 1989 will not be very obvious internationally, and little is built on it in the work. The reference to the Holocaust, evident in the stylization of the children’s home with a circular inscription above the entrance at the end of the railway tracks, is quite problematic.
Tauš threw all his strength into intense images and succeeded with them. But the whole is more like a kaleidoscope of a life full of hardships. The key, according to the film, is that we, like Emu, are accompanied by hope, even if it is illusory.
The American Girl premiered in theaters on September 26, 2024.
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