ADELHEID (1970)
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TÍTULO: Adelheid
AÑO: 1970
PAÍS: Checoslovaquia
IDIOMA: Checo, alemán
DIRECTOR: Frantisek Vlácil
INTÉRPRETES: Petr Cepek (Viktor Chotovický), Emma Cerná (Adelheid Heidenmannová), Jan Vostrcil (Hejna)
ARGUMENTO: Checoslovaquia, 1945. Finalizada la II Guerra Mundial, los expatriados regresan a su tierra. Viktor va a los Sudetes, donde le han adjudicado una propiedad. Allí conoce a Adelheid, la hija del antiguo dueño, un oficial nazi ahora encarcelado...
Nunca digas nunca jamás. Heme aquí abriendo hilo a una película de Frantisek Vlácil (!) rodada en plena efervescencia de la llamada nueva ola checa (!!) ¿Y eso? Voy a copiar el comentario de un "entendido" que resume la opinión mayoritaria: Retrato intimista de antiguos enemigos que aprenden a superar conflictos políticos sin sentido por medio del deseo en una realización bastante convencional, muy lejos de la capacidad expresiva y belleza de su obra maestra Marketa Lazarova. Para mí es justo lo contrario, Vlácil abandona el enfatismo de sus películas épicas y firma una obra sobria y sentida, la mejor de las suyas que conozco.Although František Vláčil’s directing career continued to 1987, Adelheid (1969) was the last of his films to get much exposure outside his native country. It also marked the end of his most creatively fertile period: in the years following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Communist authorities prevented him from making features until 1976.
Adelheid differs quite sharply from its predecessors. Firstly, it’s in colour, and eschews widescreen in favour of the Academy framing of his first films. Secondly, after three films set in the very distant past (The Devil’s Trap/Ďáblova past, 1961;Marketa Lazarová, 1967; The Valley of the Bees/Údolí včel, also 1967), he adapted material set during his lifetime, in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The largely German-speaking part of northern Moravia, formerly known as the Sudetenland, had been notoriously annexed by Hitler’s Germany in 1938, after which its Czech and Jewish inhabitants were persecuted. Not surprisingly, after the Allied victory of 1945, the tables were turned, and it was the Sudeten Germans who found themselves the victims. Since they were informally considered guilty of collusion with the former oppressors of Czechoslovakia unless they had an evidence-backed track record of anti-Nazi activity, reprisals were fierce and frequent.
A brief summary of Vláčil’s film, adapted from a novel by Vladimír Körner, his screenwriter on The Valley of the Bees, could make it sound like a straightforward, almost clichéd wrong-side-of-the-tracks romance between a Czech man and a German woman. Typically, though, he approaches this material far more obliquely. Though Czech-born and possessing the rank of lieutenant, Viktor Chotovický (Petr Čepek, also the lead in The Valley of the Bees) spent much of the war in Aberdeen, working in an RAF desk job. Adelheid Heidenmann (Emma Černá) is initially assumed to be an innocent victim of anti-German prejudice, but it transpires that she’s the daughter of one of the most notorious of the local Nazis, whose trial and inevitable execution occurs in the background to the main narrative (so much so that it’s only referred to in passing). And even if one accepts that the sins of the father shouldn’t be visited upon his offspring, Adelheid has a dark and ultimately murderous secret of her own - which, again, is riddled with moral ambiguity.
After a series of misunderstandings concerning his arrival that neatly sketch the dominant atmosphere of uncertainty and paranoia, Viktor makes himself known to Inspector Hejna (the avuncular Jan Vostrčil, familiar from several early Miloš Forman films), and is charged with the task of looking after Heidenmann’s large country house and draw up an inventory of its contents. It’s a job that suits him perfectly, as he doesn’t have to talk to too many people: it’s clear from the opening scenes that he’s badly out of sync with the prevailing mood, and welcomes the opportunity to ignore it altogether - at least as far as is possible.
The ‘courtship’ (if that’s not too strong a word) between Viktor and Adelheid, now working in the house as a servant, is initially marked by sidelong glances, hesitant signals and the occasional bout of flagrant voyeurism (when Viktor finds a pair of binoculars, he uses it to spy on Adelheid adjusting her clothes outside). Gesture is all they have when alone together, as they don’t speak each other’s language - Viktor doesn’t even find out her name until near the halfway mark, and has to piece together impressions of her past life through assorted clues in the form of old photographs and letters. When they finally talk directly to each other, near the very end of the film, any potential for intimacy is dashed both by the situation (an interrogation following a double murder) and the obtrusive presence of an interpreter.
As Viktor reluctantly discovers, it’s impossible to exist in a vacuum, especially at a time of national turbulence. Whatever his private feelings for Adelheid, it’s politically and socially impossible to express them in public, despite the film being set in a supposedly liberated country. Vláčil had already got into trouble with the authorities over The Valley of the Bees, and Adelheid was similarly suspect in that it raised awkward and troubling questions about a time that the Czechs would rather forget, as it shows them in a less than heroic light at a time when they were supposed to be the glorious (and, by implication, magnanimous) victors.
Perhaps appropriately for such a quiet, slow-burning piece, Adelheid is much less visually flamboyant than Vláčil’s other 1960s films. There are recurring motifs of a train (the camera adopting its viewpoint) entering and leaving a tunnel, and a painting of a nude woman mysteriously riddled with bullet holes (one of which has virtually obliterated her face), but these are exceptions. The soundtrack is similarly spartan by comparison with its ornate predecessors: Zdeněk Liška is again involved with the music, but only in terms of adapting existing pieces by J.S. Bach and Johann Strauss, perhaps as an abiding reminder that German-speaking culture will always have something worth preserving.
Agradecemiento especial a pgmele, quien me hizo llegar expresamente esta copia.
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