Tag: world war one

The Chambermaid (Sluzka)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

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Part British television drama Upstairs Downstairs, part illicit lesbian romance, this film undercuts fears of stodgy, conservative product to deliver instead a story full of fearless performances which, for all its faults, constantly disturbs and surprises. The action takes place in Prague before and during the time of World War I.

he late 19th century, a small town in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Anka (Dana Droppová) is the bastard child of Eva. The pair are close until in Anka’s teenage years, her mother marries a man with three children who promptly finds a position for Anka to get her out of the way. Thus, the girl commences work as a chambermaid in a wealthy German household in Prague where she’s told to say Yes Milord and Yes Milady whenever anything’s asked of her by the master and mistress of the house.

She arrives when there’s a big social gathering going on, and is asked by Milady (Zuzana Mauréry) if she can sing. This leads to a her confident rendition of a Slavic folk song. You might think this is going to develop into a narrative thread but it doesn’t, an indication of the film’s major weakness: it constantly throws in new ideas some of which then don’t go anywhere, and there are even new ideas coming up in the final reel, for instance that Milord (Karel Dobrý) has been involved with various dodgy dealings (arms manufacture and sales, perhaps?) for which the incriminating paperwork needs to be burned when there has been no hint of this up to that point.

Likewise, she’s warned that the daughter Resi (Radka Caldová) can be difficult, but nothing quite prepares you for a sequence where Resi, on the pretext of not being able to find a brooch, orders Anka to strip off to prove she hasn’t stolen it. This seems to be primarily about humiliating the servants rather than any peculiar sexual fetish, and bears no relationship to their subsequent friendship and lesbian relationship either.

Other ideas thrown up by the narrative ARE however taken up to emerge as major story threads, and there are quite a few of them. Milord is partial to violently slapping those to whom he objects, which sometimes includes his wife should she dare to offer her opinion. As she later explains to her daughter when talking about marriage, you soon learn to keep quiet after you’ve been slapped a few times.

Milord is also partial to seeking temptations of the flesh elsewhere, something one of the older, more established maids Lisa (Vica Kerekes) is keen to exploit, working her was up to becoming his mistress with a house that he’ll pay for. The gardener is upfront about messing around with any woman who will let him, so when Resi is on the verge of marrying Gustav (Cyril Dobrý from All Quiet On The Western Front, Edward Berger, 2022)), she sends Anka to sleep with the gardener to obtain a full report. Anka’s verdict is, bearable and over quickly, but when she attempts to demonstrate this to Resi, it lasts longer, is far more satisfying and develops into a long-running relationship. So much so, that after Resi has birthed her first daughter, Anka becomes the child’s nursemaid until Milady bans her from that position after discovering Anka and Resi sharing a full bathtub together.

The cook Kristina (Anna Geislerová) is branded an old maid by Lisa, although she also possesses midwifery and abortionist skills which makes you wonder what happened to her in her past. Nevertheless, a memorable scene or Resi giving birth in which there’s a real possibility she might die is brilliantly conveyed in a lengthy reaction shot of Anka’s face. A later sequence has Kristina diagnose Lisa as pregnant and perform an abortion, with Anka required to drop a foetus-sized package of one of the city’s bridges into the water just as throughout the film she also empties chamber pots into street drains under the admonition, our employers must be allowed to think their shit smells sweeter than ours.

Resi, meanwhile, comes to despise her husband. He is sheltered and foolish enough to be delighted to get called up for active service in WW1, and Resi is so keen for him not to come back that Anka elicits details of how to curse somebody from Kristina so that Anka and Resi can perform a makeshift witchcraft ritual (basically, walking round a room stark naked with a broomstick between her legs) to curse him. He comes back from the war wounded, an embittered figure who has lost one leg, one eye and, perhaps more significantly, whatever self-dignity he previously possessed.

Anka is religious enough to pray nightly for her mother and the Emperor, so clearly her Christianity (probably Catholic or Orthodox) is of the state- and establishment-bolstering variety. It’s difficult to see what other impact it has on her life.

For all its veering around all over the place narrative-wise, this proves an engrossing two hours, far more so than you might reasonably expect.

The Chambermaid premieres in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

1917

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

When the trailer for 1917 debuted, it bore a similar aesthetic to Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017) – not an entirely bad thing, but not the preferred style, either. I had shared the minority view that Nolan’s film was, in the words of The Guardian’s David Cox, ‘bloodless, boring and empty’. The menace and spectacle of its opening quarter petered out into litany of tepid peril overcast by Hoyte van Hoytema’s gloomy cinematography.

Thankfully, 1917 makes a quick break from these facile similarities with its tight pace, raw emotion and staggering camerawork. It is one of those rare films where, as a reviewer, you risk getting stuck in a rabbit hole of superlatives – so here goes it.

Firstly, the performances, though good, are not what drive this film. It is instead an intensely sensory experience that demands to be seen on the biggest and best system. Roger Deakins’s masterful camerawork bobs and weaves through the trenches of the Western Front in seemingly one unbroken take, capturing the men of the British Expeditionary Force with a visceral fluidity. After ten years of excellent cinema, 1917 will be counted amongst the decade’s most impressive and absorbing.

Everyone in this film is under overwhelming pressure – few more acutely than Lance Corporals Blake (Dean Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay). The young men are ordered to carry a message across enemy territory that will prevent a British battalion of 1,600 men, which includes Blake’s brother, from charging into a death trap.

Chapman and MacKay both give strong performances. Blake is a chipper lad given to jocular anecdotes and crude jokes, while Schofield, apparently the more experienced of the two, has developed a war-weary reserve. There’s a mutual respect and affection for each other, though, and their extraordinary experiences only makes their bond stronger.

This tight, simple premise and character dynamic sets the stage for one of the most remarkable portrayals of combat in recent memory. It may not have the thematic depth of Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957), but Mendes conveys the all-consuming stress, misery and exhaustion of total war. Many of the men Blake and Schofield meet are in varying depths of hate and prostration, but most are driven by a stoic resolve to keep moving forward, whatever their dismal fate may be.

Key to the film’s immersion is Dennis Gassner’s epic set design. We follow the troops as they traverse yard after yard of dank trenches, and the scope becomes even more grimly arresting when they scale the parapet, entering a vast, ghoulish wasteland of sodden craters, splintered trees and mangled bodies. Indeed, there are moments across No Man’s Land that resemble the body horror of David Cronenberg; the attention paid to the grisly details of death and decay is disturbing as it is appropriate.

Inspired by the stories of his grandfather, director Sam Mendes and DOP Roger Deakins have made the biggest and best First World War film of the 21st century. This is important, because for better or worse, cinema has the power to reinvigorate history, to spread knowledge and awareness. After all, the First World War has been overshadowed by the conflict that followed, with its clearer moral compass and even greater level of destruction. Mendes’s film, while not a depiction of the war’s terrible stalemate, will nonetheless assault one’s senses and give them some idea of what their forebears endured in Britain’s deadliest war.

1917 is in theatres Friday, December 10. On VoD on Monday, June 1st. On Netflix on Friday, September 10th (2021)