Going Nowhere Under Occupation
Going Nowhere Under Occupation
L. Quart: Under Occupation
a film directed by Marek Najbrt
MAREK NAJBRT’S Protektor is an extremely handsome film whose action takes place in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. The film provides its historical background through newsreels, ending with the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942. The brutal Heydrich (known as “The Hangman”) was the Third Reich’s Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. Under his command, Germany virtually annihilated the Czech resistance in two weeks, after first arresting and executing the premier, Alois Elias.
Protektor begins in 1942, and then leaps back four years to a close-up of a beautiful, melancholy actress, Hana (Jana Plodková), watching herself in her breakthrough film. The film was never released—Hana is Jewish, and with the Nazi invasion and the promulgation of repressive anti-Semitic laws, her career abruptly ends.
Hana is married to an athletic, non-Jewish radio journalist, Emil Vrabata (Matthias Brandt), whose career flourishes as Hana’s collapses. Protektor is on one level about their respective fates, and the nature of their shifting relationship as history overtakes them. We see them both from a distance (some cheery musical fragments add to the detachment). Viewed from the outside they are distinct characters, but their inner feelings remain totally unexplored. Neither of them can escape from history, but they and the other characters in the film display a variety of reactions to their country’s occupation—from cynical adaptation to outright, if futile, rebellion.
Hana is a chain-smoking, narcissistic, self-destructive neurotic, who operates as if the world outside the movie studio and the wild parties she attends doesn’t exist. Out of loyalty to Emil, and a desire for stardom, she refuses to leave the country when she has a chance. It’s soon too late, and the Nazi occupation makes it clear to her that in the new order she is a non-person, trapped in her apartment and cut off from the outer world.
Emil is at first insecure about his relationship with Hana, and jealous of Hana’s male costar. However, after his journalist friend, Franta (Martin Mysicka), is arrested for refusing to self-censor his anti-Nazi sentiments, Emil becomes the voice of Nazi propaganda in Czechoslovakia and the dominant one in their relationship. Emil is no Nazi, but he is an opportunist and wary of any of colleagues who engage in provocative behavior. He at first remains committed to Hana, but their relationship (which feels passionless) breaks down, and she soon stops talking to him. Emil, by now a semi-celebrity, has affairs, as does a lost Hana, with a morphine-addicted projectionist, Petr (Tomas Mechaacek). Bored by the claustrophobic life inside her apartment, she dangerously acts out, putting on a blond wig from her film and draping herself beside signs forbidding Jews as Petr takes photos of her.
Emil, though far from a hero, gradually becomes repelled with his role as Nazi spokesman. The film concludes with Hana joining other Jews in a transport that will take her to the concentration camps; Emil, who has gone to look for her on his bike, stands impassively in their way, as German soldiers club him to the ground. Protektor offers no happy ending, and no Czech resistance heroes to emulate—the young men who kill Heydrich play a marginal role in the film, and a subplot involving Emil and a stolen bicycle diminishes the significance of the act. The Czechs have never been believers in martyrdom.
What grants the film special interest are its arresting, almost indelible surfaces—bleached-color cinematography with noirish shadows, and the black-and-white, semi-abstract interludes that see the characters furiously peddling their bikes to some nameless destination. The film opens with a highly stylized montage of bicycle chains, spokes, and gears. A pedal-powered score then wheels the audience into the year 1942. These repetitive images serve as a metaphor for people like Emil and Hana, who struggle to find some direction but basically are going nowhere.
What’s most striking about the film is its ironic view of a repressive murderous world, depicted in ambiguous rather than Manichean terms. It’s a view that can be seen, with historical variations, in other contemporary Czech films, like Jan Hřebejk’s Kawasaki’s Rose. In Protektor all the major characters are flawed, but only Heydrich and the Nazis are evil, and they play a peripheral role. The Czechs fumble about, trying in varied ways to deal with the occupation, some less craven and accommodating than others. But the film doesn’t moralize—Emil is not a monster, but just a weak person who finds his new status briefly intoxicating. People might betray themselves and each other, but in this film, their humanity lingers.
Leonard Quart is the coauthor of the fourth edition of American Film and Society Since 1945 and is a contributing editor of Cineaste.
