Pupendo
Directed by:
Jan HřebejkScreenplay:
Petr JarchovskýCinematography:
Jan MalířCast:
Bolek Polívka, Eva Holubová, Jaroslav Dušek, Vilma Cibulková, Jiří Pecha, Lukáš Baborský, Nikola Pešková, Matěj Nechvátal, Jan Drozda, Pavel Liška (more)Plots(1)
A bittersweet comedy set just prior to 1984, during the era of 'practical socialism'. For political reasons, Bedřich Mára has had to give up teaching at Prague's Academy of Art. He is not allowed to exhibit and has been pushed to the sidelines of interest and lucrative commissions. He and his ceramicist wife and two sons live in a small apartment on the outskirts of Prague. Míla Bečka, the school principal, and his family stand in stark contrast to the Máras. Comrade Míla and his ambitious wife, Bedrich's fellow student from the Academy, have gone with the socialist flow for years. They find justification for their behavior in the usual words: 'Someones got to swim along with them to make things better; someones got to make that sacrifice!' (official distributor synopsis)
(more)Reviews (3)
Pupendo might have been a great film if it hadn't been so attached to the prospect of commercial success and didn't go hand in hand with audience expectations. The resulting shape is fun, pleasant, but in my opinion broken and wasting the power of the message. I spent two and a half hours in the movie theatre with pleasure, for the humor of Šabach-Jarchovský-Hřebejk is miles away from the stupidity of television shows, and it is damn good that millions go to see it. Pupendo will become a classic, but this does not change the fact that it does not achieve the qualities of Cosy Dens (I prefer not to talk about "We have to help each other"). Jan Hřebejk knows how to walk out of his shadow, but this time he unfortunately did not.
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When Holubová and the previously brilliant Dušek start to repeat themselves and can no longer surprise you, you suspect betrayal. But when Hřebejk becomes an annoying routine, it's almost heartbreaking. With distance, Pupendo became the harbinger of the crisis in Czech cinema, where viewers rarely encountered a new combination of established acting teams in a casual viewing of the cast. When such a situation occurs and you are annoyed to see the same scene known from elsewhere for the umpteenth time, all you can do is wait for Pavel Liška to come along, to break the atmosphere with his unforgettable expression and his boar-like voice uttering eternal wisdom. Complicating bland family relationships with a ballot box or a sculptural commission, that's what I call scriptwriter's helplessness. The inflated eccentric bubble remains just a bubble.
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This film focuses on the 1980s. Maybe that's a good thing because if this writing team wanted to comment on other decades of Czech history in their own way, I probably wouldn't be able to take it anymore. I would have been able to give Pupendoa better score if the scene with the drawn fur coat remained in the movie theater version.
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