2 1/2 Stars (out of 4)
Triple Czech
These World War II romance movies can seem like a trap. On the one hand,
they're pleasant and innocuous enough while you're watching them, but
nothing really stays with you. On the other hand, if you don't like it,
you feel you're disparaging a whole generation of veterans, not to
mention the brave souls who are fighting for our honor right now.
To be frank, after seeing
Dark Blue World
you may have a hard time
separating it from
Pearl Harbor
or
Divided We Fall
or
The Man Who
Cried
or
Captain Corelli's Mandolin
or
Charlotte Gray
. I liked a
couple of these films and did not like some of the others, but they're
all basically attempts to recreate
Casablanca
– a romance heightened
by the backdrop of war, where any number of events could rip a new love
apart.
Director Jan Sverák, who won a Best Foreign Film Oscar for
Kolya
in
1997 and will probably be nominated again this year, says in the press
notes that he wanted to pay tribute to the brave Czech fighter pilots
who escaped the Nazis and joined the British Royal Air Force to continue
fighting. But Sverák's main focus is a forgettable and slightly forced
love triangle set during this time of upheaval.
Pilot Franta (Ondrej Vetchý) and young trainee Karel (Krystof
Hádek) become friends in Czechoslovakia before escaping to England
together to join the RAF. The film plays up the comedy while we wait for
the men to fly their first mission. They grow restless, and we learn
little things about the men who will eventually be killed — one young
pilot likes to draw but has no talent for it. Another gets "the runs"
before each mission. These little character details are supposed to make
us feel bad when they get shot down.
Karel's plane crashes in a field and he survives, making his way to a
nearby house. There he meets the older and beautiful Susan (Tara
Fitzgerald, from Mark Herman's wonderful
Brassed Off
). She takes care
of him and explains that she's married but doesn't know if her husband
is still alive or not. They make love and Karel leaves, smitten.
He brings his best friend Franta to meet her, and what do you suppose
happens? Susan falls madly for the older, more experienced man, and they
begin an illicit affair. The younger man flies off in a jealous rage
when he discovers the ruse.
Sverák does his best to make this romance stick, but it's hard to
believe that Susan would drive herself onto the RAF base to see Franta
after only one meeting, and a pretty dull one at that. Sverák also
employs such simplistic symbols as a white helium balloon that floats
down from the barracks ceiling and pops just as Karel storms out of
Franta's life forever.
In between the romance scenes we get a few flying missions and the poor
Czech pilots keep getting taken by surprise and plunging into the ocean.
I was reminded of Josef von Sternberg's
Jet Pilot
(1957), which made
far more interesting use of flying scenes, though
Dark Blue World
has
the modern-day advantage of big explosions and computer effects.
And to make the story seem even more tragic and timeless, Sverák and his
writer father Zdenek Sverák play the whole thing as a flashback, with
Franta a prisoner in post-WWII Czechoslovakia. (The film explains that
the Czech RAF fighters were not welcomed back home after the war.)
The problem is that
Casablanca
is
Casablanca
and
Dark Blue World
is not. It succeeds on some level because of the nostalgia factor, but
it fails to take into account 60 years of audience sophistication (I
know that sounds like an oxymoron, but bear with me). We can be lulled
by
Dark Blue World
easily, but we cannot be stimulated by it until it
updates its rusty tactics.
Starring:
Ondrej Vetchý, Krystof Hádek, Tara Fitzgerald, Charles Dance, Oldrich Kaiser, Linda Ryboyá, Lukás Kantor, Radim Fiala, Hans-Jörg Assmann, Miroslav Táborský, Thure Riefenstein, Anna Massey
Written by:
Zdenek Sverák
Directed by:
Jan Sverák
MPAA Rating:
R for sexuality/nudity
Language:
Czech, German, English, Slovak, with English subtitles
Running Time:
112 minutes
Date:
January 11, 2002