"Kolya" (15) Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin
The winner of this year's Oscar for best foreign language film, Jan Sverak's endearing Kolya is set in Prague in the months before the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and deals with the initially difficult relationship between a Czech and a Russian. The Czech - played by the director's father, Zdenek Sverak, who also wrote the screenplay - is the 55-year-old cellist and confirmed bachelor, Frantisek Louka, and the Russian is the five-year-old Kolya (Andrej Chalimon) for whom he is forced to take responsibility.
Having fallen foul of the communist bureaucracy, Louka has been reduced from playing cello with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra to performing at funeral services - and to augment his meagre income, he renovates inscriptions on tombstones. His dream of buying a second-hand Trabant, a symbol of the communist era, seems unlikely to be realised until a gravedigger advises him to marry a Russian who needs Czech papers to avoid being sent back to Russia. The payment he receives will buy him the car and cover his debts - and he can divorce her in six months.
It all seems too good to be true when his bride proves to be young and attractive, a single mother with a young son, Kolya.
Complications arise when she abruptly goes to Germany to be with her boyfriend and leaves Kolya in the care of his grand-mother: Louka reluctantly has to take charge of the boy when the old woman dies.
There is an allegorical subtext to the film as the Czech, weary of life under the communists, finds him self caring, for the young Russian invader in his life, and as the lives of these ordinary people are set against the backdrop of momentous political change of which they are barely aware. There are more pressing personal problems for Louka as he copes with playing at fatherhood for the first time in his life - not least that he and the boy do not even speak the same language.
This is the fourth feature film from the 31-year-old Czech director, Jan Sverak, whose first film, The Elementary School - also scripted by his father - earned him an Oscar nomination five years ago. In the genuine, unforced warmth and humanity which permeates Kolya, and in the superb, unaffected performances of its two leading actors, it recalls Francois Truffaut's moving and heart-warming films about childhood.
At its dramatic core is the perfectly judged development of the relationship between the cynical, middle-aged man and the innocent boy, as it moves from irritation and resentment to affection, in what ultimately proves to be a liberating experience.
Accompanied by a gorgeous score - which has Dvorak's music to the 23rd psalm, The Lord Is My Shepherd, as its theme the result is deeply touching and irresistibly charming without ever succumbing to mawkishness. Beware, however, the inevitable Hollywood remake.
Flirt (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin.
In the introduction to the screenplay of his three-part film, Flirt - published by Faber at £7.99 the American writer-director, Hal Hartley, describes the project as "an exercise" and "like a school assignment", which began as a single short film shot in New York City- in the spring of 1993. At the time, Hartley was preparing to shoot his feature, Amateur, the first he would be editing on, computer, and he saw the short film as an opportunity to learn about that editing process.
As a short film in its own right, that New York episode of Flirt is a diverting and deftly handled picture of an incorrigible flirt - played by a regular Hartley actor, Bill Sage - who is forced to confront commitment as an option. In the tedious exercise that is the three-part Flirt, the same story is told with minor variations and in different languages, and set and shot in Berlin and Tokyo. Hartley indulges himself with a role in the Tokyo story.
"Moll Flanders" (18) Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs
Just as last year's movie version of Jane Austen's Emma drew comparisons with the Andrew Davies adaptation made for British television at the same time, now it's the turn of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, recently seen as a Davies mini-series on ITV. Shot on location in Ireland in 1995, this version by American-based writer/director Pen Densham stars Robin Wright as the eponymous heroine in a bowdlerised and barely recognisable version of Daniel Defoe's picaresque novel. Densham, whose screen writing and producing credits include Robin Hood, Prince Of Thieves, Backdraft and the dreadful Blown Away, gives us a version of the story which is understandably simplified but unnecessarily sanitised.
Born of a convict mother from whom she is separated at birth, this Moll is raised as an orphan by Catholic priests and nuns in what seems to be a convent (in early 18th-century, London?) before being taken in by a wealthy benefactress (Brenda Fricker). Moving to the premises, of brothel keeper Stockard Channing, she is rescued from prostitution and alcoholism by the love of a romantic young painter (John Lynch), whose daughter she bears. But when Lynch dies, her fortunes turn again for the worse. She loses her child and is transported to the New World colonies.
All this is told In flashback form by MoIl's friend Morgan Freeman to her daughter (young Irish actress Aisling Corcoran), who he has found after years of searching. Along the way, we run across a wide array of Irish actors in small character roles, ranging from Jim Sheridan as a licentious priest to Ardal O'Hanlon as a client of the brothel. Dublin serves adequately as London (although the courtyard of the Castle is overused, figuring in almost every street exterior), and there is a strong sense of the contrasting wealth and squalor of the period, enhanced by Consolata Boyle's richly detailed costumes, which were nominated for a Golden Satellite Award last January.
Robin Wright delivers a performance which carries more conviction than the writing merits, as does John Lynch as the tragic romantic hero. It's a pity all this talent has not been put to better use. Densham has leached all the fun, spite and humour from Defoe's story, leaving behind a rather po-faced moral tale. In Densham's version, Moll is presented as a passive victim of the cruelty of the times, rather than the rambunctious survivor of the original novel. Wright tries hard to bring some vigour to the part but even Stockard Channing, as the malevolent madame,. seems oddly restrained in a film which would have benefited from a little more bawdiness and a little less bathos.
Hugh Linehan
"Anaconda" (15) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs
Eric Stoltz, Jennifer Lopez and gangsta rapper lee Cube are the unlikely heroes, and Jon Voight the hilarious villain, in this unspeakably bad reptilian horror flick - more a Z than a B movie. Messrs Stoltz Lopez and Cube are members of a documentary film crew travelling up an uncharted tributary of the Amazon with the intention of filming a reclusive native tribe for the first time.
Along the way, they pick up shipwrecked Voight, a spoiled priest turned snake hunter (with a highly implausible Paraguayan accent) who leads them astray for his own mysterious reasons. Before you can say -Snakes Alive!", all and sundry are being gobbled up for lunch by a 60-foot anaconda. It strikes, wraps around you, holds you tighter than your true love and you get the privilege of hearing your bones break before the power of the embrace causes your veins to explode," explains Voight in one of his more restrained moments. "Then it swallows you whole." So it proves, and one by one the more minor members of the cast are despatched in the prescribed fashion until the final denouement.
The film's makers have made much of the high-tech gadgetry, mechanical and digital, which has allowed them to create their monster snake, but the digital effects in particular wouldn't fool an astute three-year-old (it seems strange, by the way, that, this film, which sees the regurgitation of partially-digested human corpses,, receives a 15s cert, while the relatively innocuous Moll Flanders is restricted to 18s). The idea that less is more doesn't seem to have occurred to director Luis Llosa, who reveals his limited cards too quickly, leaving little scope for suspense. Worst of all, though, the film gives the impression of having been scripted and edited completely at random. Non-sequiturs and, plot, loopholes abound, culminating in the ridiculous finale) which wraps everything up in less than a minute, as if everyone had just had enough of the whole darned thing. Who could blame them?
