Just in from the Berlin International Film Festival, Shane Danielsen of indieWire has posted a glowing review of Kawasaki's Rose, the latest film from Czech master Jan Hrebejk, which premiered this past Friday as the opening night selection of the prestigious Panorana Special section. Here's what he had to say about the film:
"Theirs were the usual discontents: The parties were fewer. The market was slow. There were no good movies. Had they not seen ‘Kawasaki’s Rose’? The latest from prolific Czech director Jan Hrebejk and screenwriter Petr Jarchovsky, it was easily the best feature of the first few days, the one undeniable ‘find’ of the festival so far.
I couldn’t say I was surprised. To my mind, Hrebejk has long been the most criminally neglected of major contemporary international filmmakers: a consummate director of actors, with a subtle but undeniable visual sense and an instinctive grasp of structure. Yet despite having produced roughly one film a year for the past decade, and having been nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar (for 2000’s ‘Divided We Fall’), this is the first of his works to premiere at one of the Big Three European festivals. And even then – in another inexplicable programming decision – it wasn’t in Competition, as it should have been, but appeared instead as a “Panorama Special”.
Writing in Variety last September, I pointed out that there’s a complete body of work there – nine features to date – awaiting discovery by some enterprising programmer or festival. They’re small movies, mostly modern-day domestic dramas, but are distinguished by their humanity, unusual intelligence, and the unadorned elegance of their craftsmanship. “You have to stay small to go deep,” one character says here, and a neater explication of Hrebejk’s philosophy I have yet to find.
This one – about an elderly man, a respected figure from the Communist resistance, whose misdeeds during the Dubcek era are slowly revealed – slipped easily back and forth between various perspectives (and such is Jarchovsky’s skill, every character here was nuanced, contradictory, fully realized), and parceled out its revelations as deliberately and rigorously as a conspiracy thriller. Less hectic than ‘Horem Padem’, more emotionally resonant than ‘Beauty In Trouble’ (as fine as each of those films was), it ranked among the writer and director’s very finest work to date. "
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