Král kolonád

Král kolonád is an auteur film to the extent that it is no longer worthy of being considered Czech cinema. Zeno Dostál wrote his own novel "Lev" and he developed it into a film theme and later a screenplay, which he directed. What's missing is someone to help the whole project pull itself up to a better level. As sensitive and important as the topic is, Dostál does not distance himself from it. Not in the slightest. The work with the individual actors is weak. Even routine actors such as Brodský or Chýlková just fill up space, while Vašut and Sajfertová are in front of the camera only by mistake. The main couple, Barbora Leichnerová and Josef Novotný, suffer from the fact that Novotný was never a professional actor and she was just a popular teenager of the time. Many individual valuable motifs disappear, popular music, the Holocaust, collaboration... As a television production entrusted to another creative team, only loosely adapting "Lev," would probably have achieved the ideal result. (09/18/2020)