Návrat idiota
Czech Republic,
1999, 100 min
Shown in 2000
CREDITS
- dir
-
Sasa Gedeon
- prod
-
Petr Oukropec
- scr
-
Sasa Gedeon
- cam
-
Stepán Kucera
- editor
-
Petr Turyna
- cast
-
Pavel Liska, Anna Geislerová, Tatiana Vilhelmová, Jirí Machácek, Jirí Langmaser
- source
-
Negativ Ltd., Kremencova 15, 11000 Prague 1, Czech Republic. FAX: 420-2-5732-5040. EMAIL: office@negativ.cz
-
COMMENTS
Pavel Liska and Tatiana Vilhelmová in person.
OTHER
Sasa Gedeon’s second feature is an eccentric, exceptionally detailed tale told with confidence and a wry sense of humor. Loosely based on Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, the film is more than a mere adaptation: It is a riff on the novel’s themes, and the cultural and spiritual landscape of post-Communist Central Europe is predominant. The story centers around a small Czech town whose humdrum rhythms are interrupted by the arrival of a young man recently released from a mental institution. He gets caught up in the town’s romantic entanglements, and his slightly confused interpretation of events ironically helps everyone bring their feelings into focus. There’s a patient, intensely cinematic consciousness at work here. Gedeon’s pacing is deliciously slow, and he’s quite happy to linger awkwardly on certain moments, suggesting but never fully enunciating their transcendent possibilities. Cinematographer Stepan Kucera’s images are rich without being excessive, and the framing and timing of his slow zoom shots make them nothing short of luminous. Along with other recent films like Raoul Ruiz’s Time Regained, this is a work that redefines the terms of exchange between film and literature.
—Jerry White
FACTOID #80
Irving ’Bud’ Levin, owner of San Francisco’s Metro Theatre, founded the SFIFF in 1957. However, Levin credited the idea for creating the Festival to the Italian consul general at the time, Pierluigi Alvera, who became one of its staunchest supporters.
