That she and her collaborators were not bored with the work is more than obvious, the question is how the audience will be. The Avenger is presented as a comedy, but it is almost not funny at all, and its acceptance unconditionally depends on the desire to play her play with the author.
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He is definitely different from the others, he is provocative, coughing up the boundaries of genres, conventions and taste, but being just different and deliberately provocative has never been and is not enough to make a good comedy.
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The central character is the once successful actor Anton, played by Daniel Fischer, who was fired by both the theater director and his wife due to drunken fads. To keep his face at least in front of his son, who admires him infinitely, he tells him that his current “difficult period” covers a secret mission, an expedition to Mars.
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The rest of the film, that is, the vast majority of it, is a series of bizarre sketches in which the author’s message about the need for freedom and creativity is wrapped in highly stylized and eccentric images. These, together with nothing else, are very often related to nothing but as an illustration of Anton’s pilgrimage to the very bottom and then back to the clouds…
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On this pilgrimage, Anton meets various figures, the most prominent of whom is the mental mystic and poet Mouka, played by Jaroslav Dušek with obvious taste. He is primarily the bearer of (probably the author’s) opinions, when he claims, for example: “Artists are drunk. Only those who get the job will stop. They go crazy, they stop feeling, perceiving, they stop being interested. Then they are still just satisfied. “
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Sex games with an extremely fat naked woman, accompanied by the words “you are so inspiring, Mareno”, are probably supposed to refer to Fellini and the pop songs of the seventies and eighties.
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Even the references to the Soviet Union, in turn, the author probably shows in what she grew up in, what she did not want and what the company has not got rid of to this day.
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And Anton’s dialogue with God, who has a catfish face, is supposed to symbolize the helplessness of today’s world: “Would you like to?” “I don’t even know you, so hurry …”
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Such and similar, or rather any messages, links or metaphors, will probably be found in every film in the film exactly as much as they want, you can find, after all, in the scene of performing a large bodily need in a car at a junkyard.
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It’s literally on everyone, with the unwritten rule that the more wisdom and symbolism, the less fun and more boredom, it fits very precisely. The realistic line of the film is more enjoyable, although even here one hardly laughs, which is of course a problem with comedy.
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It is clear that Klein Svoboda did not want to provoke on his own. Although she often uses such shocked “shocks” as naked buttocks, bare lures and penises and toilet shots, the Avengers wanted to make a film that would bring many, albeit not discoverable, messages and at the same time entertain.
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Some scenes are shot really creatively, the film undoubtedly looks “different” and exactly as the author wanted. Unfortunately, that’s all, she couldn’t make a funny comedy.
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| Avengers Czechia 2021, 93 min. |
| Director: Lucie Klein Svoboda. Cast: Daniel Fischer, Jaroslav Dušek, Ivan Franěk, Milan Šteindler, Pavla Tomicová and others. |
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