BEAUTY IN TROUBLE

Beauty in Trouble is the deeply involving tale of a Czech family. In the impoverished wake of the great Prague flood of 2002, Jarda (Roman Luknár) has been imprisoned for stealing cars, and his wife Marcela (Ana Geislerová) and children, Lucina (Michaela Mrvíková) and asthmatic Kuba (Adam Misik), go to live with Marcela’s mother, Zdena (Jana Brejchová). The tight quarters are not eased by Marcela’s stepfather Richard (Jiri Schmitzer), who tyrannizes them with inexhaustibly inappropriate behavior. To the rescue comes Benes (Josef Abrhám), a rich vintner whose car was stolen by Jarda. He falls in love with Marcela and offers a new, luxe life for her and the kids.

Like Silvio Soldini’s exceptional new Italian film Days and Clouds, Beauty in Trouble focuses on a family’s dealing with strapped finances and is beautifully observed all the way through, with unending human surprise. These are the kind of movies Hollywood should be making, for people to relate to in these troubled times, instead of remakes of comic strips or glossy romantic comedies of a fairy-tale unreality.

Director Jan Hrebejk and co-writer Petr Jarchovsky begin their film with a blistering fight between Jarda and Marcela, and the domestic combat rarely lets up. However, instead of being put off, you are inexorably drawn in: These are real people facing real problems with both mordant humor and somehow fiercely indomitable survival instincts. The cast could not be bettered—you grow to really love these characters, which have a novelistic richness.

Schmitzer gives a dominatingly complex performance, with a Gogol depth of texture, alternately frightening, darkly comic and, ultimately, endearing. He has some riveting speeches in which he expresses his domestic authority as well as the inconvenience Marcela has imposed upon him, which are met with reactions combining the humbled with the skeptical on the part of the kids, who perform with terrifically affecting accuracy. Their young lives have already exposed them to far too much, and they cope with a half-innocent, half-calculating impassivity, or, as when their parents make love too loudly, by simply covering their ears with pillows.

The vital Brejchová is compelling and care-worn, her character torn between mother love and that she feels for the impossible Richard, who always seems to win out in the end. As Jarda’s religious mother, Emilia Vásáryová has a different but equally effective intensity, adding her own perversely maternal flavor to this roiling stew of emotion. Abrhám’s character might easily have been too much of a fantasy fulfillment, but he imbues Benes with a low-key, watchful strength which clearly shows, in business or romance, that he is nobody’s fool.

Geislarová, with her ever-wary feistiness and looks which can magically change from mousily embittered to dazzlingly radiant in a frame, is the fit center of the film and a truly memorable screen heroine, febrilely making you feel even the slightest passing setback of her difficult life. She has a fine combative chemistry with Luknár (handsome and moving), especially in their passionate moments. Hrebejk ends the film on a marvelously equivocal note, with Marcela ensconced in a Tuscan villa courtesy of the devoted Benes, having phone sex with the irresistible lout she can never quite shake off.