Kawasaki’s Rose: A World of Irony and Ambiguity

L. Quart: Kawasaki’s Rose

CZECH DIRECTOR Jan Hřebejk set his 2000 film, Divided We Fall—nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film—in a small, Nazi-occupied town in Czechoslovakia during the Second World War. Every character in Divided We Fall, including the central couple, Josef and Maria, who courageously provide refuge to a Jewish escapee from a concentration camp, is flawed. They all must enter into compromising situations in order to survive in a world where suspicion, betrayal, and murderous repression are the norm.

Watching Divided We Fall, one is conscious of that black comic and ironic vision that was Czech literature and film’s trademark. (Think of Jaroslav Hasek’s acidic, satiric novel, The Good Soldier Svejk.) Major Czech directors were once known to every film-lover: Ivan Passer (Intimate Lighting, 1965), Jan Nemec (Diamonds in the Night, 1964), Jiri Menzel (Closely Watched Trains, 1966), and the most famous—who made a successful transition to American film with his 1975 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—Milos Forman (Loves of a Blonde, 1965). Most of their films perceptively observed ordinary, everyday behavior, sometimes through a comic lens, and at other times touched with gentle sympathy and wit. The directors were humanists whose work could be both absurd and poetic, and all of them were gifted filmmakers.

Kawasaki’s Rose, Hřebejk’s latest movie, contains only a few flashes of his humor. Written by Petr Jarchovský, it is the first ever Czech or Slovak feature film to deal with the subject of informing and cooperation with the Communist secret police and the nature of collective memory—a Czech variation on of the German film, The Lives of Others. It’s a subject that has roiled Czech intellectual life in recent years, even touching the internationally renowned Milan Kundera. The Czech literary icon, who authored The Joke and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. was initially a committed Communist, but became disenchanted and was kicked out of the Party. He fled the country in 1975 and had his work banned. However, in 2008 he was confronted with well-documented charges that when he was a twenty-one-year-old student he denounced a Western intelligence agent to Czechoslovakia’s Communist police. Kundera angrily denied the accusation. True or not, the episode has left, I would assume, a heavy moral burden upon him.

Kawasaki’s Rose begins not with political intrigue, but with the personal drama of the forty-year-old, angrily insecure sound engineer Ludek (Milan Mikulchik), emotionally caught between his wife, Lucie (Lenka Vlasakova), who has been in hospital for a stomach tumor, and Radka (Petra Hrebickova), his blond, Buddhist colleague and lover. The triangle’s romantic conflict never comes alive and is quickly dropped after Lucie throws Ludek out of the house. But it does set the film’s central subject in motion.

Ludek is working on a television film documentary about Lucie’s father, Pavel (Martin Huba), a sophisticated psychiatrist. Pavel, exuding a confident and calm persona, is soon to receive a “Memory of the Nation” medal from the Czech government for his valiant work as a dissident who “stood up to totalitarianism” by signing the anti-Communist Charter ‘77. Ludek, jealous and resentful of Pavel for what he perceives as his contempt for him (“a nobody”), has little use for Pavel. He realizes during the shoot that the virtuous Pavel carries a horrible secret: he once collaborated with the Communist’s security apparatus by becoming an informer. He tells his pink-haired, punk-styled granddaughter Bara (Anna Simonova) that anybody (meaning himself) who lies and steals perceives himself as a fraud inhabiting an “inner prison.”

Kawasaki’s Rose avoids using flashbacks, instead evoking what happened in the past through penetrating close-ups of the characters as they convey their conflicting memories. At first Pavel and his totally supportive, intelligent wife, Jana (Daniela Kolarova), deny his being a collaborator, calling the charges “lies and filth.” But the evidence piles up, including the testimony of the only totally unsympathetic character in the film, the ironically named Kafka (Ladislav Chudik)—a chilling, old, ex-secret police investigator, who sees “interrogation as an art form,” and views his methods of coercion as humane and necessary. (This is the post-Stalinist Czechoslovakia of the 1970s, so the techniques used to intimidate people were somewhat subtler than in earlier decades.)

In his testimony, Kafka talks about Borek (Antonin Kratochvil), who turns out to be Jana’s former lover and Lucie’s father—a bearded, plump, sloppy, bohemian sculptor, whose charisma, spontaneity, and warmth make him the film’s most likable character. Borek has been living in Gothenberg, Sweden for close to forty years, after the Communists decided that he was too rebellious to be allowed to stay in Prague. Pavel, in his professional role as a psychiatrist, does the dirty work for the secret service in forcing Borek to emigrate.

The film’s plot sometimes gets too tangled, and the side narrative referring to the movie’s titular Kawasaki’s rose (one of the hardest figures in origami to construct, whose complicated layers, like the film’s, are peeled back only to reveal more layers), is awkwardly inserted into the flow of the story. Moreover, one sometimes feels that the director and screenwriter have over-determined the film’s characters, for the purpose of envisioning a world rife with contradiction—ambiguity for ambiguity’s sake. But Kawasaki’s Rose is a consistently intelligent work, and a number of the characters go beyond illustrating its thesis, coming to life as intricately layered creations, just like the Kawasaki’s rose.

Pavel is clearly no villain; he’s a decent, sympathetic figure who judges himself harshly for what he did in the past. When he receives the medal, he finally speaks honestly and eloquently of his past failures, of wrongs he committed that can’t be atoned for, and of the fight we must fight against the loss of memory. He also asks forgiveness from Borek.

Borek, in his inimitable way, does forgive him. Hřebejk’s film asks that Pavel’s actions not be judged too quickly, showing that the world can’t be simply divided between the moral and the immoral, the innocent and the guilty. Yes, Hřebejk and Jarchovský say, we must not forget that transgressions occurred, but “many cowards and heroes were not clear-cut.” And in Kawasaki’s Rose, as in all their collaborations, they ask us to understand that, especially in a world where politics were bound by fear and repression, it’s hard to make judgments on human behavior. Whatever its minor flaws, this film is a trenchant work about how one lives with a toxic history, where coming out unscathed may be a next to an impossible task.

Leonard Quart is in the process of co-authoring a fourth edition of American Film and Society Since 1945 and is a contributing editor of Cineaste.