The windows are lit with a bluish light, the camera closes up and often from wild angles captures the face of the blonde singer, who is desperate for happiness. In the 1990s, not much changed for Iveta Bartošová.
The three new parts of the mini-series Iveta, which began to be shown by the Voyo video library from Friday, continue in the same overly melodramatic tone as last year’s first season. The question of what this project wants and can say is even more intense.
Iveta belonged to the first wave of original live acts that Nova TV wanted to lure to its paid platform, the “Czech Netflix”. Director and screenwriter Michal Samir conceived the opening three parts as an endless pop song of its time, similarly sweetly overwrought, only with slightly darker contours, which should have indicated from the beginning that this modern fairy tale about a princess who set off into the big world in search of happiness will not end happily.
At the beginning of the second series, with the quick announcement of the winner of several years of the Golden Nightingales, we smoothly move to the post-revolutionary era. After the death of her life and singing partner Petr Sepeši in 1985, Iveta Bartošová belongs to the stable and later to the household of producer Ladislav Štaidl. At the same time, such a harsh turn is appropriate: the filmmakers show with almost artificial consistency how possessive all the men around her treat the young performer.
Again, the director neither mocks nor adores Bartošová. However, it relies too much on the contrast of musical performances with the arguments and hopeless situations of the protagonist. As if there was no space, will or perhaps permission from loved ones to really interpret some events from her life. Or at least catch the central actors also in some more mundane situations.
Ondřej Gregor Brzobohatý portrays the blasé elegant Štaidl with great effort and at times, but sometimes it is hard to tell who he is actually playing. Are some of the twists rubbed on purpose, is it supposed to be a portrayal of a person who is considered to be an educated person, but is far from being one?
Ondřej Gregor Brzobohatý in the role of Ladislav Štaidl and Anna Fialová as Iveta Bartošová. | Photo: Martin Mlaka
Depicting the relationship with Bartošová is even more complicated. Their splits and coming back to each other happen simply because it was like that in reality. In the case of the singer, it is clear that she only longs for her loved one and her offspring, but the motivations of the partner’s behavior are completely indecipherable.
The authors mainly want to depict how the pressures of an unhappy relationship weighed on Bartošová, how pills and alcohol contributed to a blurred perception of the surroundings. The entire miniseries sees the world mostly through her lens. The focus of the second episode is a real incident where a random fan takes the singer to his cottage for a few days. He took advantage of the fact that he found her at home in a state of mental breakdown.
The camera wildly tries to imitate the deranged atmosphere as if from a paranoid thriller, it is not clear where reality ends and where it is illustrated by the shifted perception of the heroes. Although this moment is put in a different light by a later scene from the court and a certain tension is created, the episode itself is just another – albeit the most intense – depiction of the protagonist’s disorientation, which we have known for a long time.
Once again, Anna Fialová quite convincingly plays a naive, intuitive heroine who, nevertheless, at least in a few moments of her own life, can tell herself that she will now pursue her dream alone for a while.
Director Samir wants to give the character some dignity, to give her a voice back, but at the cost of the miniseries being an unbearable stay in her head.
Everything comes to life in the moments when the parents from Frenštát pod Radhoště come to visit and suddenly more actors take part in the drama at the dinner table. But even these moments are ultimately just a repeated and abbreviated description of how, above all, the father reproaches his daughter, that she and her sister, Ivana Bartošová, played by Eliška Křenková, left them “on their heels” alone far from Prague.
The first part of the second season of the Iveta miniseries can be seen on the Voyo platform from Friday. | Video: Voyo
In the end, what to take from this never-ending sad dream? The miniseries sometimes functions as a grubby retro teleport to the first post-revolutionary decade, when Japanese whiskey was served in Chinese restaurants and when suits and hairstyles changed slightly from the 80s, but taste did not increase.
Individuals can be examined, such as who and how portrayed famous personalities from Gabriela Osvaldová to Karel Gott to Rudolf Hrušínský the youngest.
The period during the filming of the movie Vampire Wedding from the early 90s seems the most vivid and carefree. There are moments of togetherness between Bartošová and Hrušínský, who appears to be the first man in her life who does not behave like a partial or complete moron, but like a completely understanding human being. Was there something more to it, a romance or the seed of something bigger? If so, why didn’t it work? The mini-series remains with hints that the singer’s indecisiveness and inability to take a more active role in her own destiny was to blame.
It could easily have been, but is such a fate in life really material for a multi-hour story if most topics can be summed up in two or three sentences?
The miniseries briefly touches on how Ladislav Štaidl seems condescending and patronizing, how he talks about mutual personal freedom, but only thinks of his own. However, these are only the miniature seeds of a real character study. In the end, once again, the main emotion evoked by watching is regret, even though we leave the heroine at the moment when she returns to the stage after her maternity break. It’s hard to say how much strength will remain in the audience to watch her further falls.
