The politically useful victim status of one marginalised outsider group is cynically weaponised against another in Slovak director Michal Blaško’s assured debut feature, a prickly morality play that squeezes some big questions and timely themes into its modestly scaled social-realist format. After picking up acclaim in Venice, Toronto and elsewhere, Victim was recently named as Slovakia’s official contender in the Academy Awards race for Best International Film. Though the topic feels familiar and the dramatic treatment is fairly straight, that Oscars connection and positive critical buzz should solidify healthy art-house prospects. Meanwhile Blaško’s film continues its prize-winning global festival tour, earning a Special Jury Mention in Cairo last week.
Victim opens in the pulse-racing rush of an urgent family crisis. Single mother Irina (Vita Smachelyuk), a Ukrainian migrant worker in the middle of applying for Czech citizenship, is anxiously fighting her way back across the traffic-choked border to her adopted homeland after hearing that her teenage son Igor (Gleb Kuchuk) is in hospital with serious injuries. A promising gymnast whose sporting ambitions have now been ruined, Igor appears to be the victim of a vicious random attack by unknown assailants in the stairwell of their crumbling apartment block in an unnamed Czech border town.
Igor’s memories of the attack seem vague, until Czech police investigator Novotny (Igor Chmela) steers him to give the crime a racial dimension, with blame falling on the dark-skinned Roma neighbours upstairs who are already on prickly terms with Irina. When the family’s eldest son is arrested, it looks like an open and shut case: perfect victim and perfect villain. Irina and Igor then become sitting targets for careerist politicians and opportunistic activists, with anti-Roma activist Selsky (Viktor Zavadil) organising a “March for Igor” while the town mayor (Gabriela Mícova) gifts Irina with a handsome new apartment and a generous compensation pay-off, which conveniently also serves as great PR for her office.
Spoiler alert here: Igor eventually confesses the real story behind his injuries was a clumsy accident, not a criminal attack. Irina is plunged into moral turmoil, initially lying to protect her son, but their small private deception blows up into a major public fraud. Revealing the truth now will mean shame and vilification, losing the compensation money, and probably sabotaging her fragile ongoing application for Czech citizenship. When she expresses guilt about the arrest of an innocent Roma boy to her Russian friend Sveta (Inna Zhulina), her response is brutally telling: “fuck it, he’d have ended up in prison anyway.” In the film’s closing stages, Irina tries to find an agonising balance between noble half-truth and convenient fiction, unwilling to give up the privileges of her socially valuable victimhood but also wary of being complicit in victimising other, more marginal underclass groups.
The traditionally nomadic Roma have been demonised in central Europe for centuries. In a 2019 poll, over 60 per cent of Czech citizens openly confessed to harbouring negative feelings towards this impoverished ethnic minority, who make up only around two per cent of the population. In this context, Blaško’s empathy for the thinly sketched Roma characters in Victim is commendable, though it is more theoretically implied than dramatically depicted. It would have been more persuasive to include their viewpoints and struggles on screen instead of wholly centering the narrative around Irina and Igor. That said, with its deliberately vague location and stark Ibsen-esque plot, his film is clearly intended more as a universal morality play than a specific case study. Indeed, Jakub Medvecky’s screenplay was inspired by a range of similar episodes of racial prejudice in Slovakia, France and Italy. Different surface details, same undertow of toxic xenophobia.
Mostly shot in long takes on nimble, mobile, hand-held cameras, Victim has a kinetic docu-drama naturalism that echoes the freewheeling, in-your-face intimacy of Romanian and Georgian New Wave cinema. A twisty procedural plot is the key dramatic hook while Smachelyuk’s intense, internalised, quietly magnetic performance is an effective emotional energy source. With no musical score, and only a washed-out colour palette, aesthetic frills are minimal. Even so, cinematographer Adam Mach finds pleasing moments of visual poetry in this bleak urban fable, from figures silhouetted against a misty square to an elegantly composed closing tableau soundtracked by a bitterly ironic use of the Czech national anthem.
Director: Michal Blaško
Screenwriter: Jakub Medvecky
Cast: Vita Smachelyuk, Gleb Kuchuk,Igor Chmela, Viktor Zavadil, Inna Zhulina, Alena Mihulová, Veronika Weinhold, Gabriela Micova,
Cinematography: Adam Mach
Editing: Petr Hasalík
Producers: Jakub Viktorín, Pavla Janoušková Kubecková
Production companies Electric Sheep (Germany), Nutprodukcia (Slovakia), Nutprodukce (Czechia)
Venue: Cairo International Film Festival (Critics Week competition)
In Czech, Ukrainian, Russian
91 minutes
