REVIEW / Cinemas bypass Mord. After a long time, a fresh Czech film, written and shot by Adam Martinec, which took home a Special Recognition from the competition at the Karlovy Vary festival. It’s set on a country slaughterhouse and it’s a blast. Not just pork.
Osoblažsko, northern Moravia. In the backyard of a dilapidated village house, a family of four generations meets according to annual tradition. A killer is about to be killed, which is a very serious and masculine matter, after all, the patriarchy can be heard and felt here from the first moment. Women have their place in the kitchen, between chopping onions and boiling water, they complain about men, yet they promise each other: “We’ll make it nice for them.”
But there’s a lot going on here, from the moist cartridges needed to kill the animal to the snarky crackhead neighbor and the little boy who won’t be allowed to be with the slayer, so he gets lost somewhere in the fields, to the tired grandfather who doesn’t know how to tell others that he doesn’t want another slayer .
And that’s not all. The annual ritual in the backyard slowly becomes a valve that lets out old traumas, marital and generational misunderstandings, emotional frustrations of some women. “You can’t even cut an onion properly,” Karel, the master of the house, gets angry. The untamed macho has an opinion on everything and reigns imperiously over the family and the killer, but only until he slips and spills the precious blood of the just-killed animal destined for the soup.
A killer in sight
By the way, it sounds a little bizarre, but not a single pig was killed during filming. Even two or three decades ago, something like this would probably have been unthinkable. But conditions in the industry have changed. “Originally, I thought for a long time that it wouldn’t do without actual killing. But I found out that there are laws and certain moral standards in the industry, and I had to respect them,” explains the 34-year-old FAMU graduate, who is making his feature film debut with Mordem. With the fact that various consultants, mainly abroad, ostracized him to be careful.
Just the fact that the film takes place on a killer can have a negative effect on festival goers, perhaps even those in cinemas. “It surprised me a lot while I was writing the script. Maybe it’s an artificially created myth, but I’ve come to terms with it,” adds the filmmaker. “I understand that the Western film world does not want to harm or stress a living animal. Nevertheless, I think that those who have been to a slaughterhouse at least once know that the key act, when the animal leaves, is terribly powerful and changes people and their relationship to it. Because they will realize the sacrifice it gave them. It is a form of ritual. If we defend him fiercely like this, we will be a little poorer.”
That in the end the film looks so authentic, including the necessary “murder”, is the credit of the director, his non-actors and the cameraman. (Just a side note, the representative of the butcher, Antonín Budínský, helped out, buying the necessary pieces of meat from the butchery.) Just a collective project in the truest sense of the word.
Personal experience
The scriptwriter and director in one person was inspired by memories of his own childhood, which he lived in Krnov (where it was also filmed), and it shows in the film. Personal experiences and stories from the family, but also a good observational talent and a gift for writing accurate characters and dialogues give the film what is desperately missing in current domestic genre films. Not to mention the charming perspective, which can be read, among other things, from the mention of the fact that female killers have been banned by the European Union, or from the grotesque hunting of a pig, which is accompanied by the tones of the battle song Who are God’s Warriors in slow motion…
The casting of non-actors, who give the film its distinctiveness and stamp of authenticity, is essential. Their connection with several professional actors (among others Albert Čuba, Aleš Bílík, Pavlína Balner) works perfectly, hats off to the direction. They are dominated by Karel Martinec, the director’s father, who sovereignly mastered the killer field in the role of Karel and who – by the way, in his civilian profession as a financial advisor – has a natural talent. “Adam gave me instructions like ‘Don’t act, you’re not in the theater’ or ‘Speak normally’,” smiled the director’s father Karel Martinec when meeting with the media. And just to be sure, he added: “By the way, I’m really not as terrible as the movie Karel.” The father’s contribution to the film is key, he manages all the changing moods of his character – pride, anger, joy and sadness. His animal energy and commitment also drags others around.
A touch of Forman
The comparison of Mord with the Czech new wave of the 1960s (when watching it, Passer’s or Forman’s films are sometimes brought to mind) is completely appropriate. Without deliberately copying, Martinec filmed a brisk, bitterly funny and apt look behind the scenes of one family, in which it is not just a matter of gossip over shots of slivovice, but also a statement about the Czech nature, family and neighborly relations, about putrid loneliness and incompetence listen and talk with loved ones. And also about the image of the Czech countryside.
David Hofmann’s camera, which becomes an active part of the plot during the killing, has something to say about this, at other times it seems to casually occupy the dilapidated human buildings and JZD buildings. But it also offers poetic shots of the landscape surrounding this remote corner of Moravia, where people sometimes hate each other, envy, complain and yell at their wives, but somehow they still love each other in their own way.
