A year on from his debut feature, Mirrors in the Dark, Czech director Šimon Holý returns with another examination of relationships built around probing dialogue. As with his previous film, his new one, And Then There Was Love…, is centred on a female protagonist searching for direction, this time the 60-year-old Kristýna (Pavla Tomicová) for whom a string of romantic disappoints have proven punishing. Receiving its world premiere in the new Proxima Competition at Karlovy Vary, this low-key, mostly improvised drama lays bare painful histories and personal failings but also offers hope of emotional – and specifically female – emancipation.
The film opens with a focus group facilitated by Kristýna. A collection of women with apparently different backgrounds discusses vague topics pertaining to an unknown product. The conversations reveal subtle group dynamics – some seem to crave approval; others roll their eyes in snide judgement. The scene’s tensions and camaraderie act as a precursor to the various conversations between women that will be the focus for much of the film – rippling hints at deeper running waters. If that scene predicts what is to come, the very next one lays out the character’s history. The audience witnesses the latest in what transpires to be a long line of rejections when a younger colleague in Kristýna’s office rejects her, despite a prior dalliance. For Kristýna, who had begun to daydream of a shared future, this is the final straw, and she corrals her daughter, Sára (Sára Venclovská), into joining her at a “therapeutic séance.”
What follows is an intriguing series of prolonged conversations, most often between a combination of Kristýna, Sára, and the fortune teller, Zdenka (Tereza Hofová), sometimes with the addition of her assistant and niece, Lenka (Eliška Soukupová). These scenes lay bare the shortcomings and frustrations on both sides of the mother-daughter relationship, explore the direct and indirect impacts of generational trauma, and, to a lesser degree, question the validity of Zdenka’s particular brand of psychological and emotional healing. Improvised almost entirely with the help of the four actresses – who are credited as co-screenwriters – the dialogue has a naturalistic feel that leads to eddies, digressions, and cyclical arguments. Audiences may find some of these too meandering but they’re in keeping with the film’s treatment of a knotty subject and an understand the less than linear ways that these conversations progress.
The conversations themselves are captured in a variety of different compositions, but most frequently in a single long take containing all of the interlocutors. This serves different functions depending on the conversation – from the framing of Kristýna and Sára on a big double bed, turning back and forth to face each other or not as they thrust and parry, to a long panning shot as they walk in the countryside, in stride, and seem to make progress. Where these single take mid-shots are most commonly interrupted are in discussions involving Zdenka. Here, Holý and his cinematographer, Jana Hojdová, employ more familiar shot-reverse shot setups, that convey the back and forth of the question-and-answer format, but also allow the ability to punch in for moments of heightened emotion. This is especially true in a monologue by Kristýna in which she lists the wrongs done to women in her family by men, including Sára’s father. It’s a big moment for Tomicová, and she well and truly delivers on her close-up.
This decision also allows for the film to complicate its position towards Zdenka. Throughout the film the audience is primed to be wary on behalf of a fragile Kristýna in part because of Sára’s overt distain. Later, after Zdenka wrong-footed Sára by appearing to read many specific details of her life in the tarot cards, Kristýna reveals that they were all things she had told Zdenka over the phone. However, Zdenka is also the source of some form of disruption, both in the film’s visual language and in Kristýna’s spiral of desperation. Her questions about what impact Kristýna’s self-absorption has on Sára, and the implication of a cyclical generational issue seen in Kristýna’s experiences with her own mother, have far greater force than Sára pleading that can’t she ‘just be happy’? When Sára reiterates her scepticism in one scene, Lenka retorts: ‘Those women come here a fucking mess… and they leave feeling really better.’ Whether Zdenka is or is not a quack, the impact on both women is tangible, less in how they relate to one another and more in how their time undergoing a therapeutic séance helps them to recalibrate their relationships to themselves, even if there is pain along the way.
Director, music: Šimon Holý
Producers: Šimon Holý, Jan Syrucek
Cast: Pavla Tomicová, Sára Venclovská, Tereza Hofová, Eliška Soukupová
Screenplay: Šimon Holý, Pavla Tomicová, Sára Venclovská, Tereza Hofová, Eliška Soukupová
Cinematography: Jana Hojdová
Editing: Sabina Mladenová
Sound: Hana Kašpárek Vyšínská
Art Direction: Jana Hojdová, Anežka Karasová, Lucie Vejvodová
Production companies: šššššFilm, Bridge Films, PFX, Beep (all Czech Republic)
Venue: Karlovy Vary (Proxima Competition)
In Czech
85 minutes