IT just isn't the art house film one might expect. A Czech feature, indeed the first Czech winner of an Oscar (this year's Best Foreign Language Film), Kolva has not only broken every box-office record in Prague but has also taken over $4 million in the US in the last four month - which puts it alongside films such as Il Postino in attracting an audience from beyond Greenwich Village and Berkeley to its subtitles.
Its director, Jan Svernak, an angular, boyish man in his early thirties, sits back into the inevitable black leather sofa at Portobello Pictures, the West London company that co-produced the film, and acknowledges his good fortune in sweetly faltering English. "I am a viewer. I like to make the pictures I want to watch." He has cited Spielberg as an influence and one must assume we are talking E.T more than Schindler's List, because Kolya is essentially a gentle comedy about Louka, a middle-aged man who is forced to look after a five-year-old boy, Kolya.
Perhaps all the sentiment available in this scenario didn't damage the film's chances with the Academy members, but its originality really lies with Louka's position as a symphony orchestra cellist forced to play only at funerals as a consequence of his political disgrace in communist Czechoslovakia, and Kolya's predicament as a Russian child effectively abandoned by his mother.
It takes a western viewer the first 20 minutes or so of the film to unpack the basic political ironies of the situation, to realise that while Louka's lazy bohemian bachelorhood hardly marks him as a leader of the forthcoming Velvet Revolution, it does make a little "son" who greets Soviet soldiers on the streets and cheers the Hammer and Sickle a more than awkward accessory.
Svernak, however, insists that the specific politic are not important. "It could as easily have been about a German boy and set after the second World War. We had to make the trial of the old man as hard as possible, so he is forced into acts of collaboration."
From that "we" hangs another tale. Kolya was scripted by the man who plays Louka, Zdeneck Svernak, Jan's father. "Papa," as he calls him, was already a major figure in Czech theatre and cinema when young Jan, a tyro fresh from film school was asked to take over a feature, Elementary School, from another director. That film was also written by Zdeneck and received an Oscar nomination in 1992, releasing Jan from his fears about nepotism and also making him realise "that Papa is an excellent script writer".
PAPA also seems to have scheduled Jan's birth fortuitously. The timing of the Revolution "was perfect for me," he observes with a disarming eye on his career development potential. "Being so young and not a party member. Before, I would not have been allowed make a feature." As it stood, he was able to sit down and write a shooting script for his first feature, pausing only to worry about the number of shots he required: 850.
"I rang up Menzel [an already prominent Czech director] and asked him how many shots were in his last feature. 230, he told me. I was worried. So I watched an American film, Bob Fosse's All That Jazz, counting every, shot. Over 800 - I was all right.
Kolya has a similar visual richness, another characteristic that separates it from the more austere, theatrical tradition of Eastern European cinema. The film has not yet opened in Russia, though there was one Moscow screening for film professionals. "Half-way through, listening to all the jokes about Russians, I realised why Papa hadn't come to this. But only four people left, all men with lots of medals. At the end there was much applause. One man said, `It is strange: an anti-Soviet but pro-Russian film...' "
In the Czech Republic, Kolya has matched overwhelming audiences with minimal criticism. "A few critics said `This is not how it was before the Revolution - it was worse than that. We said, `look, this is comedy, not a documentary'. Anyway, the communist regime was very weak at the end. And it is important that it is about an ordinary person - Louka is not a dissident."
JAN's respect for his father mingles with entertainment. At one stage in the film, Louka plays with the Czech Philharmonic. "We waxed my papa's bow, so there was no sound, and then he played with them. At the end he was still beaming, shining. I said, `Papa, it's over'." Zdeneck has now been appointed an honorary member of the Philharmonic.
The next film, another Papa and Son project, will be in English and set in Britain and Czechoslovakia. Sverak and Portobello want to get past the barrier that sub titles still impose on distribution possibilities; which, of course, means the film will have to be dubbed into Czech for screenings in the Republic.
