Review: Anyone trade Hřebejk for Troška? That would explain the movie State of Emergency | Currently.cz

Achdřej Vetchý he plays ace reporter Karel Beran, a foreign correspondent for Czech Radio in a sort of fake, predominantly Muslim country called Kambur. But from the start, State of Emergency gives the impression that Prague, where most of the story takes place, is also fake – from the moment Beran becomes jealous of his colleague and partner, because he sees her on the Internet in a few pictures in the company of another man.

What does the famous reporter – winner of the Golden Microphone award – do on the day when there is an election in Kambur and being present on the spot is highly requested? In fact, he will go back to Prague, where he will serve his partner Tatiana Dykova along with the accused, he is kept under “house arrest” in his apartment. From there, with the help of pots, bags and tools of all kinds, he starts broadcasting fake news from Kambur, where, in addition to the elections, the revolution also started.

Those very pathetic sentences, which tried journalism for clattering pots and blowing water, surprisingly won over everyone from the audience to radio management and then almost the whole world. If we want to try to understand where we have just found ourselves, in the world that this hallucination is possible, perhaps the town of Zdeňka Trošky offers the closest analogy from domestic cinematography.

Just as Troška mistakenly believes that he is making nice folk films, while at the same time crowding his world far from reality only with undesirable, evil, provocative individuals and photographs of people, Henry by the screenwriter Milan Tesař, they moved so far away from a plausible reality that it is no longer possible to follow them there. I guess they think they satirized. But it had to have more than a little truth to it to work.

As an exception, there are only characters that are not only impossible to relate to, but above all, they all look like a bad joke.

It starts, of course, with Ondřej Vetchý. He plays the best heroes with a gloomy character and a small attitude, then he is good, for example in a series The tree of the area. As soon as he gets to play for people who are really good at something, he usually stops being believable.

This time the situation is complicated, because his character Karel Beran is probably supposed to be a full name. Fortunately for him, he happens to be in a country that mistakenly resembles the Czech Republic, where Babrals like him can become stars on Czech Radio.

People like Bořek Slezáček continue to move in this country in the role of head of intelligence. He has seven world languages, he can quote famous Arabic poets, but he is a cynic who cares about numbers, and then also the same fool as the others, because he will not appear that Beren’s odyssey from the stove is a lie.

In addition, for an unspecified reason – he really is a neighbor, that must be enough – Jaroslav Plesl appears here, perhaps so that the creators can laugh at the teachers as well as the radio presenters. This cantor is a paranoid moon who, among other things, tries to carve an imaginary slice out of his stomach at home.

Otherwise, there’s a lot of yelling, pots banging, Vetchý looking for the limits of his facial acting before exploding like papyrus. And then the Arabs are sometimes harassed here, because one of them – originally from Kambur – happens to work in the Prague editorial office of Czech Radio.

It can be read from the official materials that it was supposed to be a satire about disinformation. Unfortunately, you can’t tell from the movie itself. Instead, it appears to have been filmed by people similar to those he is talking about. And their goal was to make fun of the world around them. And also to awaken basic vitality.

The story comes first he stayed performed in the Na Fidlovačka Theater in Prague, this is probably where part of the inappropriate “when there’s a lot of shouting, it’s a lot of fun” style came from. But he is hardly able to confirm that the film really looks more like Zdenek Troška’s production than Jan Hřebejk’s. And from the point of view, even if it was filmed by those who are fashionable today and are not very happy to be called desert.

A crisis situation is much worse than most mainstream Czech “romantic” comedies. Usually the creators have no desire to say anything about the state of the world and just randomly combine different characters.

Unfortunately, Hřebejk and Tesař are trying to tell the audience something under the noise of the kitchen waste. That message is about the same value as chain emails.

The state of emergency shows the world as a strange, cruel place where you can be an immoral monster and not much happens. A world that is better to sabotage than to participate in a run.

A good comedy usually wants to encourage a person with a sense of humor to sit back and think. Satire is meant to be sharp and critical, but again with the aim of making some sort of social assertion. The state of emergency does not announce anything. It brings more paralysis than detachment from anything real.