Nástup

The film is hardly a dignified comrade of Václav Řezáč's legendary novel, as Vávra compressed the colorful and almost cowgirl drive of the literary masterpiece into a schematic and in some moments unplayable pathetic agitation film, which completely lacks a strong atmosphere of wild border conquest and constant existential uncertainty of "socialist cowboys". Bagar role played by Chudík is too superficial and it lacks the ubiquitous doubting of Řezáč's character, and when the worst happens, he immediately shields himself with the Party and the inner drama is gone. He doesn’t even really twist the knob, which just makes you want to kick it. The caricatures of the Germans, led by the terrible she-wolf Elsa Magerová (Marie Vásová) and the peculiar albino Walter Prüll (Radovan Lukavský), are really great. The scenes with the Red Army are significantly "Vávra-inflated" - the master had a feeling for crowd speeches, which are contagiously stupid with their joyful musicality and red tones. The construction of some dialogues are truly stupid. They are based on the book but are said from the mouths of real people, and the ideological proclamations sound outrageously ridiculous and willing. It's too bad. Deployment could have been a nice adventure spectacle from the border region, of course very ideological, and unfortunately, the ideology just got worse from there. (09.01.2007)