“So what are you going to inform us about it?” the cops ask the primary character, the anonymous gardener. He’s coping with a critical matter. Unknown perpetrators overturned his multicar on its aspect, which limits his motion and enterprise. However the interrogated doesn’t say something. Like the entire film. The expressive facial expressions of the superb Oldřich Kaiser nonetheless convey sufficient: pleasure, disappointment, anger, bitter amusement on the senselessness of the loop through which he discovered himself…
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After Havelk’s earlier two movies, through which individuals talked virtually on a regular basis, that is an surprising transfer. However not self-serving. The silence of the Kaiser’s gardener highlights the absurdity of a world through which everybody refers to phrases, for instance the letter of the regulation, however nobody can do something with them. However, nevertheless, it’s not doable to behave the place it’s not permitted by the suitable regulation written on paper – it’s taken into consideration somewhat than the truth that the competent authorities have in entrance of their eyes.
Phrases don’t have any that means for a gardener. In his harmonious microworld, whose order is dictated by nature, he can do with out them. We’ll watch him in it because the time-lapse capturing came about – all year long, from March to March. Every month is condensed into in the future, which at first has kind of the identical course. The protagonist chooses a neighborhood publication from the mailbox, has breakfast along with his companion (Dagmar Vokatá), adjustments into work garments and goes to until, plant, graft and fertilize. Then lunch, dinner and mattress. And the subsequent day/month once more.
Daša Vokatá performs the gardener’s spouse within the movie, photograph: Donart Movie
Misplaced between nature and civilization
On the identical time, every month is launched with an excerpt from Karel Čapek’s columnist guide 12 months of the gardener. Solely then will we hear the characteristically coloured voice of Oldřich Kaiser outdoors the image. Paradoxically, nevertheless, it’s not the voice of the protagonist. A number of scenes present the characters listening to the audio model Gardener of the yr within the radio. It’s not in regards to the narrator standing over the story. On this respect too, due to this fact, the gardener stays separated from the world of phrases. Simply as Čapek retains his distance from the odor of rabbit pens and grime underneath his fingernails with the linguistic refinement of his bon mots.
Though the movie relies on an actual case, when the Czech gardener René Mandys refused to promote his plot to a Russian oligarch, the provable information will not be authoritative for him. He works with grotesque figures and archetypal conditions and stands on comparable contrasts: between talking and silence, down-to-earth and cultured, pure and civilized. The gardener is misplaced someplace within the center.
Oldřich Kaiser and Dáša Vokatá make music within the movie and in actuality, photograph: Donart Movie
His routine is step by step disrupted by exterior interventions. First, he learns from an everyday buyer that he can have a brand new neighbor who has purchased a close-by fort. Then an actual property agent (Michal Isteník) involves him as an emissary from the fort to inform him about his “marketing strategy”. The proprietor of the luxurious property intends to rework the environment in his personal picture. For this he’ll want the gardener’s plot.
However the protagonist has already put down roots and doesn’t need to promote something. Whatever the generosity of the monetary supply. And so he continues to prune timber, smoke out bees, water salads which have already grown. Nature is not going to wait. However when he leaves the home in April, he discovers that his backyard is surrounded by barbed wire and the driveway has been blocked by a barrier, though it’s a public street. The employed safety officer of the company (Štěpán Kozub) was given a transparent task. Solely the gardener is allowed to drive, however not his clients.
Previous pondering, new expertise
The gardener adapts to the conceitedness of energy and places an more and more skinny stack of payments within the cash field on the finish of the day. However the intimidation continues. By destroying property and crops, devouring animals, bodily assaulting… The stoic hero can not commit himself solely to animals and vegetation, his worries outdoors the house are rising. The gradual rhythm of his days and the movie itself is altering. He commutes to the workplace, to the lawyer, to the police. The paragraphs are of little use, and though everybody guesses who the perpetrator is, nobody ventures into the fort with out direct proof. The gardener should assist himself, as he’s used to.
Film trailer, supply: YouTube
Havelk’s new movie, having the character of a people story or an image guide because of its time-space indeterminacy, is open to varied interpretations. We will apply each ecological and political readings to it. One of many central thematic currents stays the shortcoming to speak. As in Homeowners a Extraordinary occasions we comply with a assorted pattern of characters who can not discover a widespread language. Somewhat than a selected worldview, establishment or era, they symbolize extra basic existential ideas. On the one hand, self-growth, which doesn’t persuade anybody of something, merely exists in concord with nature and patiently maintains the continuity of life. However, powerless executors of energy and an entrepreneur who ignores the variability of the dwelling world and deadens the whole lot round him.
Evil within the movie stays nameless, with no title or a face, and due to this fact unassailable. He’s current, for instance, by Kozub’s watchman. Whether or not it is June or October, he wears the identical T-shirt, trousers and jacket, unable to bear in mind that the world is altering, that generally the solar is shining and generally it is freezing. For him, solely the expertise adjustments – when the mechanical barrier is changed by an computerized one after a couple of months. In any other case, he continues to blindly comply with orders, mischievously observes how the gardener is struggling, and fulfills the thesis in regards to the banality of evil.
Luboš Veselý within the movie 12 months of the gardenerphotograph: Donart Movie
The mismatch between technological and social growth, which was efficiently thematized by final yr’s Czech movie Daybreak, can also be seen within the physician’s workplace, the place the gardener visits commonly. On the second go to, the physician measures his blood strain with a extra trendy machine than the primary. Nonetheless, he doesn’t search for the deeper causes of the affected person’s discomfort.
Loosen, sow and water
Related variations and repetitions are the essential procedures of Havelk’s narration. First, it presents the widespread type of a gardener’s day, after which retains our consideration by modifying it. When the hero needs to rinse his face after shaving, as he does each morning, there is no such thing as a water coming from the tap. Immediately, nobody is sitting throughout from the gardener’s spouse on the kitchen desk. Pictures that have been beforehand symmetrical are actually asymmetrical. The hitherto silent spouse abruptly speaks…
Whereas the event of the plot will most likely be predictable even for the a part of the viewers who shouldn’t be conversant in Mandys’s case, the talked about formal and stylistic variations are a supply of humor and shock till the top. When feverish visions of clowns and being buried alive flood the gardener’s thoughts on the fringe of his powers, the darkish slapstick even turns into surreal horror for a second.
Oldrich Kaiser within the function of a gardener. He’s both gardening or caring for the animals, however he by no means speaks, photograph: Donart Movie
For some, this wild style transfer might be proof that Havelka did not know precisely what he wished. The genesis of the mission would additionally correspond to this. From a hybrid documentary to a ballad, a battle movie and a dialogue story of a pair to the ultimate type. However, as within the case of Kaiser’s reticence, this isn’t an pointless particularisation. The collision of the pure and social course of the world is prescribed on this manner within the construction of the movie, which step by step loses its strong form to graduate to an entire breakdown of order.
The scream, which just about tears the canvas through the ominous dream sequence, describes the helplessness of an individual torn from the pure cycle of issues and misplaced in a world of indicators that imply nothing. He does not need to say something, in order that anybody who has ever confronted forms or people who imagine that cash is above the regulation can relate to him. On the core of the movie, which is considerably contrived or confused in locations, is a honest frustration with injustice and disrespect for all times.
An answer that 12 months of the gardener in a equally hopeless scenario he provides, i.e. to loosen up once more, sow and water, is, like the remainder of Havelk’s movie, ambiguous. We will understand it as a resigned retreat to 1’s personal backyard and small on a regular basis pleasures, but additionally as a manifestation of knowledge. Caring for what’s can yield extra precious fruits than combating and flamboyant expansiveness.
Film poster, supply: Donart Movie
Gardener’s 12 months (Czech Republic, 2024, footage 103 minutes)
Script and course: Jiří Havelka, digital camera: Ferdinand Mazurek, music: Tadeáš Verčak, shear: Jakub Hejna. They play: Oldřich Kaiser, Dáša Vokatá, Štěpán Kozub, Michal Isteník, Alena Mihulová, Petr Lněnička, Luboš Veselý, Sára Arnsteinová, Jiří Šimek, Tomáš Jeřábek and others.
Premiere: July 18, 2024
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