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Czech Republic · 2009
Director Jan Hřebejk
Starring Lenka Vlasáková, Milan Mikulčík, Martin Huba, Daniela Kolářová
Genre Drama
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Loyalty, history and regret take center stage for university professor Pavel Josek, lauded for standing up to the communist regime when it counted most. But as a TV documentary starts to focus in on the facts of his past, new truths are uncovered which may threaten his reputation.
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Performed and directed with assured elegance, Kawasaki's Rose is a film that recognizes life as a tumultuous mess of both noble and base intensions and actions, as well as one that understands the thorny tragedies such chaos often leaves in its wake.
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
The point of this thoughtful, moving film is that the motives and actions that define human ethics are never simple and that the Communist regime was especially adept at exploiting this complexity for its own ends.
Such overall familiarity makes the over-the-top soap-operatic elements, such as a histrionic screamathon between mom and daughter, that much more grating-and Hrebejk's upending of cathartic clichés that much more gratifying.
Kawasaki's Rose is the first Czech or Slovak film to address the issue of collaboration with the former Czechoslovakia's bygone secret police. That history must still be raw for some who survived the era, as it is in "The Lives of Others."
The problem with Kawasaki's Rose is that the theme is far more compelling than the movie.
The longer director Jan Hrebejk's film goes on, the more complex the relationships become, until the film becomes little more than a talkathon.
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