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Dark Blue World
*1/2
Cinema Releases - May 17, 2002
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. 114
minutes. Czech Republic/UK/Germany/Denmark/Italy. Directed by Jan Sverak.
Written by Zdenek Sverak. Starring Odrej Vetchy, Krystof Hadek, Tara Fitzgerald,
Charles Dance, Oldrich Kaiser.
I appreciated the scenes in the labour camp. The
men look convincingly weary and sad as they get on with the harshness and
grime of living in the place. The Czechs ponder the bitter irony of being
locked up for fighting the enemy by a regime that calls itself patriotic.
One of their fellow inmates, a former Nazi doctor, has a great scene in which
he looks out of the window and muses, "I once had to check executions for
a whole week -- making sure people were dead, day in, day out." The look
in his eyes is that of a man mourning his own numbness.
The camp is run by the communist government, which
took over Czechoslovakia in the late 1940s after the Nazis had been defeated.
The Czech inmates are in there for the high crime of joining the RAF, which
is pretty unfair, considering Britain was a Czech ally, and more than a little
necessary in conquering Hitler's threat.
"Dark Blue World" would have done
well to study camp life and the surrounding politics, but the amount of time
it spends in the place totals around ten minutes. The rest of the movie is
a flashback to the Czech characters' days as British fighter pilots, when
English people lubricated them with nice cups of tea and delivered twee lines
like, "Never mind your controls, sonny, just stay off the
grass!"
As played by such noble-faced actors as Odrej
Vetchy and Krystof Hadek, the Czechs are a soft and cutesy bunch of caricatures
-- there's a piano player, a hypochondriac, a hopeless romantic who cherishes
an old girlie pic, a stuttering young kid who overcomes his speech impediment
right before death, and, of course, a handsome and thoughtful leader figure.
The plot is pretty aimless -- perhaps the film is intended as a contrast
between the glory days of war and the lousy thanks the men got when they
returned home, but the glory days consist of the men complaining when they're
not allowed to fly and then looking put out when they are. Things descend
into a stupid love triangle involving Tara Fitzgerald that seems lifted out
of "Pearl Harbor", and if there's a war movie from which you don't want to
take inspiration, it's that one.
The views of the fighter planes aren't bad --
original shots are mixed with outtakes from "Battle of Britain" to varying
degrees of congruity, while the movie's own cinematography is pleasing, giving
us deep contrasts and a beautifully balanced colour palette. Nonetheless,
it's difficult to come to terms with the fact that the director of "Dark
Blue World" is Jan Sverak, who made the Oscar-winning "Kolya" in 1996. "Kolya"
was not a complicated film, but it was one of genuine human feeling. This
time round, I'm thinking... what can one say about a movie where the eyes
of the leading man's dog are touching but the death of his best friend is
not? At least it's not as bad as "Enigma".
COPYRIGHT©
2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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