“How could God give such a beautiful country to such stupid people?” asks one of the characters in Alicia Bednárikova’s wilfully quirky Slovak comedy, Liquid Bread. Centred primarily on a day in the life of an oddball family in a small town near the Hungarian border, it’s a wry portrait packed with early morning vodka shots, intergenerational conflict, and relations wallowing in their own unique brands of restlessness and resentment. Screening in the La Cinef competition at this year’s Cannes, Bednárikova’s film mines personal and communal histories and reflects, poignantly, on how they leave their mark.
The film adopts the perspective of the youthful Zoja (Patrícia Balajová) who plays the role of narrator and casts a weather eye over her grandparents, father, and orphaned cousin. She’s enamoured and exasperated in equal measure by their idiosyncratic behaviour and keen to use it as inspiration for a film – a wink to the camera at one point suggests it is perhaps the very one we’re watching. The story is presented in three chapters: one about Zoja’s grandparents courting, despite parental disapproval; one about Zoja’s father and his sister who sadly passed away just after becoming a mother herself; and the primary contemporary chapter, in which Zoja visits for the day and the events of the past inflect the very fabric of the everyday present.
For what feels like a humorous family portrait rife with familiar faces – the cantankerous drunken grandfather, the batty grandmother, the regressing divorcee father, the cynical and witty teenage cousin – Liquid Bread crams in an awful lot and most of it successfully. Set across the course of just a few hours, its allusions range from the expansive to the mundane – religious contemplation or everyday xenophobia can quickly make way for worrying about the judgements of nosy neighbours. For all of its broad tragicomic absurdity, this multitude of elements is brought beautifully into relief by an unexpectedly bittersweet denouement. It’s one that laments people and possibilities lost to history and frames the comic shenanigans as both incredibly heart-warming and incredibly sad.
Director: Alica Bednáriková
Cast: Patrícia Balajová, Viktória Šuplatov, Ondrej Kova?, Milka Zimková, Karol ?álik
Screenplay: Alica Bednáriková, Diana Dzurillová
Cinematography: Roman Šupej
Editor: Michal Ro?om
Set decorator: Frederika Brodzianska
Sound: Jaroslav Pešek
Music: Dalibor Hevesi
Production company: VSMU (Slovakia)
Venue: La Cinef, Cannes (Competition)
In Slovak
26 minutes
