A Medieval Epic of Brutality and Belief

A movie presently undergoing a revival at Film at Lincoln Center, František Vláčil’s Czechoslovak epic “Marketa Lazarová” (1967), makes for an awe-inspiring, if often difficult, cinematic experience. Vláčil, along with a playwright, František Pavlíček, based the screenplay on a 1931 book by Vladislav Vančura about warring clans and religious awakening in medieval Bohemia. Vančura wrote nine novels before he met his end, along with 2,000 of his countrymen, when he was killed by the SS in reprisal for a political assassination. “Marketa Lazarová” didn’t see an English translation until 2016.If Vančura’s book took a while to get to these shores, Vláčil’s movie has been similarly hard to access. An American release in 1974 was severely edited and critically lambasted: The New York Times described it as a “film of epic grasp and butter fingers.” A Vláčil retrospective mounted by BAMcinématek in 2002 brought notice to the picture, as did the imprimatur of The Criterion Collection which released a 4K restoration of “Marketa Lazarová” on Blu-Ray and DVD in 2013. American cineastes have largely hopped on board with Czech critics who had voted Vláčil’s movie as that country’s finest film.Sitting down to watch “Marketa Lazarová” is not a decision lightly made. Vančura’s book runs 183 pages, but Vláčil’s picture clocks in at close to three hours and unfolds at a determined pace. We are ushered in with music that sounds as old as the hills but was written by a 20th century composer, Zdeněk Liška. An orotund narrator enjoins us to share a “tale [that] was told by chance, so it hardly merits praise.” Our interlocutor’s mordant tone is matched by the harsh grain of Bedřich Baťka black-and-white cinematography and intensified by the breadth of the CinemaScope formatting. Icy climes are dotted with animals, notably a pack of wolves that acts as a mirror to the cruelties of humankind. Chief among the players are the Kozliks, a brigand community of peculiarly barbaric intent. Two of its members, brothers Mikoláš (František Velecký) and Adam (Ivan Palúch), overtake a band of German knights traveling to install a new bishop in a nearby village. The marauding is decisive, but not complete.The nobleman marked for religious duty, Kristian (Vlastimil Harapes), is given a last-minute reprieve from the axe by what seems to be sheer capriciousness on the part of Mikoláš. Kristian’s father manages to escape, a development that sends the Kozlik clan leader, a scarred and brutish chieftain portrayed by Josef Kemr, into a rage. Another confrontation with the Germans is all but preordained. Omens are abundant in “Marketa Lazarová,” not least of them involving the title character. As played by Magda Vášáryová, and voiced by Gabriela Vránová, Marketa is touched in equal parts by the sacred and the profane. She doesn’t come to the fore of the movie until its later stages, but Marketa is, as a presence, inescapable.The author to whom Vladislav Vančura is often compared is James Joyce, and screenwriters Vláčil and Pavlíček bring a bent to the story that is similarly unsettled, what with rifts in time, rambling metaphorical byways, and degree of self-referentiality. Plot and character are subsumed within sneaking dispersions of sound, pivoting cinematic vantage points, and dramatic contrasts in light and texture. “Marketa Lazarová” is epic storytelling as imagined through the auspices of modernist disjunction, not quite Cubist but splintered all the same. The results are breathtaking and disjointed.Vláčil’s movie is among the most ruthlessly convincing cinematic depictions of the pre-industrial world. At the risk of flogging a dead Trojan horse, it’s worth comparing the pitiless verisimilitude of “Marketa Lazarová” with that of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey.” The former feels like we’ve been transported directly into the medieval world with all its requisite hardship, grimness and grime; the latter is a mythical milieu distinguished, in significant part, by pristine dental work and high-priced cosmetic surgery. Make believes comes in all varieties, but the earthly authenticity of “Marketa Lazarová” is part and parcel of its formal audacity. It is a remarkable achievement.

A Medieval Epic of Brutality and Belief

A Medieval Epic of Brutality and Belief

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