The inner dislocation of enforced exile and the impossibility of being fully here or there as one builds another life is at the heart of Alexandra Makarova’s Perla, an elegant and punchy political drama with shades of noir which had its world premiere in the Tiger Competition of the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
It’s the sophomore feature for the Slovak-Austrian director after Crush My Heart (2018), another story of love set against the harsh realities of Europe’s national borders. Perla seems at first a fairly classical, moody Cold War tale of personal lives ripped asunder by corrupt and impersonal power, but builds in emotional complexity thanks to the multi-faceted ambiguity of its titular character, a woman whose unapologetic and spiky impulsivity is anathema to the repressive climate of ‘80s Communist Czechoslovakia, and to a regime that ultimately poisons all of her options. The pervasive atmosphere of mistrust created by totalitarian states to break down citizens unwilling to conform is shown with creeping force in a drama that should secure wide festival play, and resonate with an era of renewed political chill.
Perla opens, as a prelude, with a scratchy radio bulletin from August 1968 announcing the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet-led Warsaw Pact troops. They crushed the Prague Spring of liberal reforms and brought a crackdown on dissent — an event that, though never directly spoken about, hangs over the whole film. It’s 1981 when we meet Perla (Rebeka Polakova), a Slovak visual artist who is dead set on leaving that time buried in the past. She has settled in Vienna and her personal and professional life, money tightness aside, seems to be on the up. She’s preparing for an exhibition in New York, and her adoring new partner Josef (Simon Schwarz), a Tibetologist, is also a hit with her ten-year-old daughter Julia (Carmen Diego). The girl’s own creative talents are channeled into piano lessons.
That all comes crashing to a halt when she receives a call out of the blue from her ex-partner Andrej (Noel Czuczor), who has been released from prison in Czechoslovakia and tells her he has a terminal illness. Perla insists on taking Julia on the perilous trip back across the border to see him before he dies. This plunges into crisis her relationship with Josef, with whom she had refused to share much about her past. He accompanies them, as the playful impetuosity of the woman he fell in love with takes on more reckless and unsettling dimensions, and her ruse of a false Austrian identity falters.
Fragments of the circumstances around Perla’s initial flight to Austria, including a catastrophic event during the journey, are teased out to us slowly, while some of the mystery is retained. This canny plotting decision understands that, while no two exile histories are the same, the details are less important than the emotional landscapes of guilt and loss that are never far from the surface.
In this pre-digital era, it was easier to disappear into another identity, but the past could still come calling, and when it does, Perla is torn between her old and new homes, and haunted again by thorny questions of priorities, loyalty and betrayal. Injustice and crushed dreams breed bitterness, and victims carry emotional scores to settle — not only with the regime, but with each other, in a climate of desperate acts. That the inner changes to Perla and Andrej brought about by tragedy and time have not made them wiser, but more emotionally unsafe and dangerous, is one of the pricklier, more unconventional angles brought to an often-told story.
A smartly chosen soundtrack spans Bronksi Beat’s Smalltown Boy to Chopin and Rachmaninoff and haunting Slovak folk. D.O.P George Weiss brings an atmospheric sense of the specificity of place from which palpable memories are made to a grand old apartment building in Vienna, a dimly lit Czechoslovak hotel with modernist stylings, and a rural village where a folk tradition of chase takes on alarming dimensions, as everyday rituals of identity are twisted by the impact of trauma. He taps the gloom and mystery of shadow, and the scrutiny of mirrors, in evoking a milieu of suspicion and surveillance, where hotel staff monitor their guests closely, and a citizenry who have internalised the ever-watchful eye of the authorities are prone to chastise strangers.
Perla leans toward the melodrama of a love triangle, as Josef realises he will always be an outsider to an unknowable part of Perla, and jealousy rears its head. Andrej is also in agony, as he glimpses the family dynamic he could have had, that another man is now living. But this is ultimately the story of Perla and her daughter, and their need to heal such a legacy.
Director, screenwriter: Alexandra Makarova
Cast: Rebeka Polakova, Simon Schwarz, Noel Czuczor, Carmen Diego
Producers: Arash T. Riahi, Sabine Gruber
Cinematographer: Georg Weiss
Editing: Joana Scrinzi
Music: Johannes Winkler, Rusanda Panfili
Production Design: Klaudia Kiczak
Production company: Golden Girls Film (Austria)
World sales: Stadtkino Filmverleih (Austria)
Venue: Rotterdam Film Festival (Tiger Competition)
In German, Slovak
108 minutes
