Artvoice: Buffalo's #1 Newsweekly
Home Blogs Web Features Calendar Listings Artvoice TV Real Estate Classifieds Contact
Previous story: Step Brothers
Next story: X-Files: I Want to Believe

Beauty in Trouble

One of my favorite foreign films of the past decade is Divided We Fall, the 2000 Czech film about a childless couple whose efforts to hide a Jewish neighbor form the Nazis lead them into an increasingly absurd series of ruses. It was directed by Jan Hrebejk and written by Petr Jarchovsky, longtime collaborators whose most recent film is Beauty in Trouble. The title comes from the Robert Graves poem—“Beauty in trouble flees to the good angel/On whom she can rely,” which was adapted into a popular song in Czechslovakia in the 1980s. If you know the poem, you may be less surprised than other viewers at some of the apparently random twists and turns the story takes. A young couple’s house is destroyed in the floods that ravaged Prague and other cities in 2002. After a year of trying to care for her two children while her husband can only find work stripping stolen cars, Marcela (Ana Geislerova) moves back in with her mother (Jana Brejchová) and her creepy stepfather (Jirí Schmitzer). Life here doesn’t seem appreciably better until she meets an older man with the obvious name (if you’re up on your Latin roots) of Benes (Josef Abrhám), who not only bears malice toward none but is rolling in cash earned from his vineyard in Tuscany, where he has lived since his family emigrated in 1957. At its best Beauty in Trouble resembles a Mike Leigh movie, taking equal time to explore all of the characters it comes across. But Leigh has more focus to his seemingly random method, whereas I went though all of this movie wondering where it was going. Somewhat disconcerting is the use of several songs by Glenn Hansard that were used in last year’s arthouse hit Once (though to be fair this film, which was made in 2006, used them first). Hrebejk has assembled a cast of top Czech film and stage actors, and the film is never less than compelling in its individual scenes. Taken as a whole, though, it feels less than the sum of its parts.

m. faust


Watch the trailer for Beauty in Trouble

Check out more movie trailers & local video on AVTV!


Current Movie TimesFilm Now PlayingThis Week's Film Reviews

blog comments powered by Disqus