The oddly titled Empties (Vratne Lahve) is the third in a trilogy about growing up and growing old by father-son duo Zdenek and Jan Sverak that has taken nearly two decades to complete. It started with The Elementary School (Obecna Skola, 1991), continued with the highly popular Kolya (Kolja, 1996) and ends with this endearingly eccentric comedy about the escapades of a retired schoolteacher.
Zdenek Sverak, who also wrote the script for this and the two previous films in the series, plays Josef Tkaloun, a nervous teacher of literature who is finally forced to accept that he is no longer up to the challenges posed by his young and obstreperous students. But Josef does not want to go quietly into retirement and seeks to continue working, first as a bicycle courier, with predictably disastrous results. He eventually finds a niche at the bottle-recycling counter of a local supermarket, from where he seeks to interfere in the lives of all around him, and get a little extramarital something if it comes his way.
Josef, for all his selfish and manipulative ways, his self-satisfaction and bullying, is in love with life. He wants to grasp it with both hands, which leads him into his various embarrassing and humorous predicaments. He indulges in a series of erotic fantasies about the women he sees at the recycling counter even as he shrugs off his wife’s efforts to reignite their sputtering relationship. Sverak manages to avoid the trap of making Josef that cliche of heart-warming cinema — the lovable old man. Josef is persistently, even insistently, a bit of a bastard, something that even at his most sympathetic moments, Sverak does not let us forget.
EMPTIES
DIRECTED BY: Jan Sverak
STARRING: Zdenek Sverak (Josef Tkaloun), Tatiana Vilhelmova (Daughter), Daniela Kolarova (Tkalounova), Alena Vranova (Headmaster), Jiri Machacek (Deputy headmaster Landa)
RUNNING TIME: 100 minutes
LANGUAGES: In Czech with Chinese subtitles
TAIWAN RELEASE: Today
Sverak is wonderfully effective as Josef, and Daniela Kolarova is sympathetic as his wife, who is almost tempted to infidelity by Josef’s indifference.
There is plenty of humor in Empties, though the laughter is gentle and more often than not tinged with sadness. The simple story is richly woven with feeling, and the pressures of holding together relationships as life draws to an end are constantly there in the background. There is a valedictory feel to Josef’s story, and the camera plays along, with many gorgeous tracking shots through the streets of Prague and its environs.
The story ends with a semi-disastrous balloon trip over the city that provides some beautiful scenic shots and serves also as an almost surreal metaphor for the vicissitudes of life. Even as the balloon almost plunges Josef and his wife into a lake, Josef stands defiant. At the end, even the recycling counter is finally replaced by a bottle-collecting machine, despite Josef’s best efforts to put off the inevitable. But fortunately, this old man is able to dream on.
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