The advantage of the former can be considerable in this case. Until the end of the year, the Christmas story by director Irena Pavlásková, the animated band About the Devil and other Christmas fairy tales, the fairy tale The Secret of the Old Bambitka 2 and the romantic Happy New Year 2 are still waiting for viewers from domestic productions.
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The film by Polish screenwriter Marcin Baczynski and Slovak director Marta Ferencová Wishes to Santa Claus takes place in a single Christmas day, and viewers will find everything they expect from a simple romantic comedy in a Christmas package. Handkerchiefs will come in handy, sometimes the film will happily bring sweet stories to life and a bit of humor.
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Santa’s wish is a remake of the ten-year-old Polish film Night Full of Miracles. Following the example of the lovely Love of Heaven and a number of much worse Christmas sweets, he watches several past, present and future couples in a tangled way, where chance, without which many characters could not meet at all, let alone entangle, plays a crucial role.
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The radio operator, Richard Krajč, the widowed father of a boy who wants to find a new wife for his father and a surrogate mother, has the largest space. There is also an older couple in the story, played by Eva Holubová and Jaroslav Dušek. They would like to meet their son’s love, but he does not have the courage to do so.
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The boy, about twelve years old, wanders through Brno alone when he comes across an irresponsible flute (Petr Vaněk), whom he will help to improve. A pregnant young woman (Veronika Khek Kubařová) prefers to be alone than with an egoistic idiot, while her sister (Táňa Pauhofová) suffers a severe life loss. When her husband (Matěj Hádek) accidentally takes a little refugee from an orphanage into the car, every spectator in the hall knows how the lives of the three will change and that the excess cup in the Christmas set will be used.
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Only the family of a police psychologist (Jiří Langmajer), his unfaithful wives and adolescent daughters will offer a surprise. That a moment with good people and a puppy is enough for this hateful three to find a rediscovered community is also a bit across the line within the genre.
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The fates of everyone else are completely predictable, not least because we have seen countless such stories. But after all, for viewers, romantic viewers of romantic Christmas comedies don’t go to the cinema. It is precisely for that highly kitschy spectacle, in which it is clear from the beginning that before the trees light up, everything will turn into joy. And if you are not sure about a multiple happy ending, it will be shown during the headlines how happily everyone lives the day after.
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Just an explanatory brief look at the lonely mother of a little tramp, who is looking for comfort at the bottom of the bottle from all the misery of the world and her life in particular, is a freeze on the liking of the environment and people. But the camera moves away from her quickly and forever, so that nothing else interrupts the time of the Christmas miracles. On the other hand, he will indulge in richly shots of decorated Brno, there are angels in the costume and figurative sense of the word, carousels are spinning, traders are selling punch, Silent Night sounds in German and Czech. We will find that a hot dog can be more than a perfect festive board, and that the greatest space for rapprochement can be offered by an Indian tent built in an attic apartment.
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The advantage of the film is several funny dialogues and some acting performances. This is especially true of Eva Holubová and Jaroslav Dušek, who, in small roles but with a strong crazy comedian, pleasantly enliven the film. Krajčo already has experience with Christmas films from Wings of Christmas and has done the job in both cases with certainty and clarity, just like Kubařová, Pauhofová or Hádek. The director had a lucky hand in filling children’s roles. Representatives of characters destined for viewers to fall in love with them are much more natural than, for example, Elizaveta Maximová or Hana Vagnerová in the roles of angelic beauties.
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Overall, Santa’s wish fulfilled what it set out to do, and even though the audience, without a greater tendency to sentiment, sometimes from all the tenderness and love to which the film is directed from the beginning, a chill runs down its back, this film certainly has a large audience.
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| Wishes to Santa |
| Czechia 2021, 109 min. Directed by: Marta Ferencová, starring: Richard Krajčo, Elizaveta Maximová, Jaroslav Dušek and others. |
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