A Sunday with the Homolkas
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In one of the most unforgettable scenes in a movie full of them, Miloš Forman’s Loves of a Blonde (1965), the parents of a traveling musician bicker over what to do about the naive waif who has shown up at their door claiming that their son has invited her. The plump figures of this working-class mother and father suggest years of ingesting worry: about scraping by in their Prague apartment somehow cramped with just the bare necessities, about the wayward ways of their son (a piano player, perpetually on tour—who knows what he gets up to, and now, this), and, especially in the mother’s case, about what the neighbors might say.
The absurd comedy of the harshest barbs that only a marriage as old and worn as theirs could survive is honed to ecstatic perfection and expanded to encompass three generations of one family in writer and director Jaroslav Papoušek’s Ecce homo Homolka (1969), widely regarded as the last great film of the Czechoslovak New Wave. Papoušek had worked with Forman on the screenplay for Loves of a Blonde, and he cast Forman’s sons, Petr and Matěj, as six-year-old twins as well as Josef Šebánek—who played the hapless father in Blonde—as their grandfather.
An untrained but supremely natural actor, Šebánek had been a truck driver and construction worker when he was discovered by cinematographer Miroslav Ondříček. His hot-blooded outbursts in Ecce homo Homolka are matched by the cutting wit of his long-suffering wife (Marie Motlová), the sheer lameness of their loser son (František Husák), and the fury of their son’s wife (Helena Růžičková), a former dancer mourning a career lost to mothering the twins, henpecking her husband, and futilely battling against the pounds she’s put on over the years.
Ecce homo Homolka begins like a lower-middle-class Czech version of Renoir’s A Day in the Country (1936). On a sunny Sunday afternoon, Grandpa Homolka cools bottles of beer in the ice-cold creek where the twins splash naked while his daughter-in-law performs an impressively spritely and balletic ode to the tall trees. When distant cries of “Help!” echo through the forest, the family joins a previously dispersed array of daytrippers—young lovers, elderly hikers, motorcyclists, mushroom hunters—appearing out of nowhere and hightailing out of the woods so as to have nothing to do with a crisis they want no part of.
Most of the rest of Ecce homo Homolka will be spent within the claustrophobic rooms of the family’s apartment. Doors will be slammed and locked; beds will be torn up, remade, and torn up again; schnitzels will be burnt, shots of vodka tossed back, warm beers popped open, and above all, a relentless power play reordering the family dynamic over and again will never ever let up. Late in the game, Grandpa and Grandma Homolka will wryly remind each other that “the family is the foundation of the state.”
Introducing the world premiere of a new restoration of Ecce homo Homolka (on a Sunday, appropriately enough), Karlovy Vary International Film Festival artistic director Karel Och noted that the film—the first in what became a trilogy—is so widely beloved in Czechia that lines of dialogue have worked their way into everyday conversation. Petr and Matěj Forman delighted the audience when they joked that they had no idea that their acting careers would peak when they were six.
Karlovy Vary is thick with stars this year—Michael Douglas, Vicky Krieps, Stellan Skarsgård, Dakota Johnson, Peter Sarsgaard—and it’s premiering promising talent in its Crystal Globe and Proxima competitions as well as screening some of the best films from the most recent editions of the Sundance, Berlin, and Cannes film festivals. As a theatrical experience, though, it will be hard to top the uplift of the packed Grand Hall roaring with laughter and recognition as a newly pristine black-and-white vision of Czech domestic life slyly reveals its boundless warmth and humanity.
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