Štěstí (Something Like Happiness) (2005), directed by Bohdan Sláma
Sláma´s Štěstí is a
film about a struggle against entropy, the natural inclination of the natural
world to disintegrate. This is why the sudden death of “the aunt” in the middle
of Toník´s
most intense efforts to build a new bathroom in a semi-derelict
farmhouse an instance of sentimental manipulation, but is an example of an
authentic life experience: the death of a loved one usually happens at a most
inconvenient moment and we are mostly unprepared for it.
The
“father” of the Czech film critics A. J. Liehm
condemned Sláma´s Štěstí during
its first showing at the Summer Film School at Uherské
Hradiště in 2005 as a “terrible film” and a
“typical Mills and Boon story”. But Elizabeth Morrison at the Czech film
seminar at Glasgow University points out that Štěstí
is not sentimental: this can be seen from the way in which the three year
old twins are depicted in the movie. A sentimental Western-style movie would
idealise them. Sláma, however, shows the children
truthfully as messy and chaotic. Perhaps the most “sentimental” are the scenes
on the pond where Monika and Toník give a boat ride
to the two small boys in a derelict, industrial landscape. But even here, the
“beauty of the children” is not in the director´s centre of attention, it is Antonín with his desire to be able to claim Monika and the
children as his own.
Sláma´s film is a kind of moral tale, but it is also a
statement about today´s society. Štěstí contrasts immoral, arrogant
egoists and decent people, whom society sees as “weak”. Sláma
rejects the prevailing ethos of the postcommunist
era: he rejects the values, which are based on commercial success,
aggressiveness and selfishness, and defends humanity, which he defines as
sensitive humane relationships. Sláma protests
against the aspirations of the consumerist society where only the ruthless,
“assertive”, business-orientated individuals can be successful. He looks at the
effort, made by yuppies, with irony. Jára, the married lover of Dáša,
the mother of the two small boys, is the biggest
“enterpreneurial” egoist in the movie. Jára takes his career of bathroom sales assistant
seriously. He puts it before everything else.
Most
Czechs obviously want to be successful, but they live in post-communist
poverty, in high-rises from the communist era. Even though they are poor and
insignificant, some of them pretend that they are, at least potentially,
“capitalist tycoons”. Sláma´s film suggests it would
be better to give up inauthentic, “foreign”, “capitalist” and to return to
developing sensitive relations with the people around one.
The
adulterous relationship between Jára and Dáša is controversial – maybe the authors of the film have
not fully thought it through. If Jára is an
insensitive and hedonistic egoist, why is he wasting his time with Dáša, who is an impoverished single mother of two small
children and suffers from serious psychological problems? Dáša,
however, is also a typical “pro-business” charater. She, too, is totally self-centered and by her psychological brutality she traumatises
her young sons. Her character serves as a warning: if you are obsessed with
yourself, such an obsession, in its extreme form, can lead to disintegration of
your personality. Dáša is on the verge of madness, She spends weeks in the psychiatric hospital. Selfishness is
a destructive element. It negates humanity.
The
battlefield is clearly divided by a frontline in this film. On the one hand,
there are humane, sensitive individuals with a “female” mentality who “do not
need to explain anything in words to one another” – they understand one another
without verbal communication. But these “female-like” characters are the losers
in the “male”, “assertive” world, which lacks empathy for the quiet and
sensitive people. The United States and modern technology serve as symbols of
the foreign, dehumanising influence of the “enterprise culture”. The new,
self-confident, consumerist and successful technological world destroys
traditions as well as subtle human relationships. Dáša
and Jára arrive in a four by four to Dáša´s sons´s birthday party,
organised by Monika and Toník, who had been taking
care of the boys while Dáša was in a psychiatric
hospital. Dáša and Jára
brutally take away the boys from the birthday party, traumatising them in the
process.
The
“nicest” character is Toník whose
predicament - as I was told by Bohdan Sláma´s wife – reflects the situation of the film director
himself before the success of his first film Divoké
včely (Wild Bees), 2001. Toník
is always available when help is needed. He is decent and reliable. Whatever he does is at least partially
successful, he is not a total failure. However, since Toník
is quietly effective and is not obviously “assertive”, he is not seen as
“successful”. He is an incongruous element in the “new” Czech society. He is,
in fact, an “angel”, a superhuman being. He does
not fit in the society of egoists and frauds, so in the end, he has to
disappear from “normal society”. He doesn´t belong in the Czech Republic of
today.
The film
deals with the relatiomships and problems of a number
of people who
live in the same high rise block of flat at the edge of a North Bohemian
industrial town. A young girl Monika lives here with her parents. She has a
commercially successful, assertive “business-like” young man as her partner.
The young man leaves for the United States to build his career.
Toník´s parents also live in the high rise flat. Although Toník is sensitive and helpful, according to Monika´s
mother he is “no good” – he has no regular pay and so, in the mother´s view,
will not be able to support his partner. Toník lives,
with his “aunt”, in a semi-derelict farmhouse
where is father was born and the family lived. He has no money because he refuses to work at
a conveyer-belt in a local factory – he rejects the value system of
contemporary capitalism as dehumanising.
The
narrative is set in motion by the psychological problems of Dáša,
who lives on the top floor of the high rise. Dáša has
two small sons and a lover - Jára,
a married man, who works as a sales assistant in a store selling bathrooms. Dáša is ill and unable to take care of the boys, so
Monika and Toník take them over. But Monika´s mother
refuses to continue helping with the boys and objects strongly saying that
Monika wants to “sacrifice” herself for them instead of joining her boyfriend
in the United States. (“What are you
playing at? Jesus Christ?”). The mother implies that we should do only what is
beneficial to ourselves. Monika and Toník try to move
the boys back into Dáša´s vacated flat, but Jára throws them out of
there because he wants to use the flat for sex with his other girlfriends.
So,
Monika and Toník take the boys and move with them
into the derelict house where Toník lives with his
“aunt”. Toník tries to modernise the house for his
new “family”. He starts by building a luxury bathroom, although his father tells him that there is no point in doing this. In Toník´s father´s view, Toník
should sell the house to the nearby factory which plans to knock the house down
and extend the business onto its land.
In the
middle of Toník´s most intense
efforts to modernise the house the “aunt”dies
of cancer. Dáša returns from
a psychiatric hospital and brutally breaks up a birthday party for her small
sons. Monika leaves for America to rejoin her business-oriented boyfriend. Toník loves Monika. All that he has been working for has
disintegrated.
At the
end of the film, Monika returns from the US and sets out to look for Toník – he has, however, disappeared. In the last scene of
the movie, during a local train journey, Monika looks out from the train at
boys from a housing estate chasing a football and a dog running along beside
the railway track. She is moved by the ordinariness of Czech life. Contemporary
Czech life is far from perfect, but it contains the roots of humanity.
Monika is
a hybrid character: she has Toník´s sensitivity, but
she hesitates, undecided, between a hard-hitting business world, which her
boyfriend inhabits, and Toník´s
“unearthly humanity”. She takes too long to make up her mind, and
so it is possible that she has lost Toník for ever.
The film,
interestingly, reintroduces the motif of Czech national identity, which has now
reappeared in the Czech community. Toník´s anxious
and futile attempts to save the family house, where his roots are but which is
of no interest to any of his relatives can be seen as a metaphor for a renewed
search of Czech national identity. This identity has been damaged, it has been neglected, it
is on the verge of extinction, but it is authentic. It is the only thing the
Czechs have. The fact that the factory nearby is interested in buying Toník´s
semi-derelict family house, intending to knock it down and build
more industrial installations on its land, can be compared to the unstoppable
pressure of the global economy which puts the Czech national heritage under
stress. And indeed, Toník gives up his attempts to
save the family home.
As
Elizabeth Morrison says, we can extend the metaphorical meaning of some of the
motifs in this film. Everyone in Štěstí is
looking for happiness in the wrong place. That can be a metaphor for the
confusion that current Czech Republic is experiencing as a whole. When at the
end of the film Monika travels by train to “nowhere”, she sees ordinariness and
pointlessness around herself. The dog is running along chasing the train, but
it can´t outrun it. Monika doesn´t know where she going – nor does the Czech
Republic know where it is going, Sláma
appears to be warning us.
Relationships
are according to Sláma more important than anything
else in the world. The sensitive Toník tells his
reluctant father to go and visit the dying “aunt” in hospital. Monika´s gentle
Dad wonders whether his daughter´s commercially successful boyfriend is a
suitable partner for life, indeed, whether
the United States are a suitable place to live. Monika´s mother blots out
questions like these. She wants Monika to be economically secure – she feels
that wealth is the most important thing in life. Her husband is a symbol of
failure for her – he is unemployed in the new, “thrusting”, capitalist society.
So what matters for her is not being human, but being commercially successful. Toník is “nice”, in her view, but that is all. It is not
enough. But in Bohdan Sláma´s
view, it is enough.
Just like
some British film directors (Ken Loach), Bohdan Sláma concentrates on showing people living in conditions
of social deprivation. Sláma finds the
essence of humanity in poverty and thereby defines himself as someone who is opposed to the commercial,
successful and hence inhuman world. Sláma however
does not produce a passive image of poverty and destruction. There is value in
being poor and unsuccessful. Success dehumanises, failure humanises, as Graham
Greene says. Sláma´s Štěstí
is a human and political protest against today´s world. In effect, it is a
political diatribe. We are moving in the wrong direction. The director has
clear views and he offers them to the viewer in this film. Why not?