finebeanies
A bleak story that depicts how the repressive regime enforces its will on the Czech people and how the enforcer's psyche becomes empty and destructive.Pouta (Binding ties) centers around a writer and a team of secret police who follow him. The chief of the secret police team is a righteous man with an empty life who has an unlimited license to inflict damage on the people he follows. He becomes obsessed with the girlfriend of his subject and starts plotting how to achieve his increasingly disturbing goals, without regard for his superiors, colleagues and collaborators.Unfortunately the script has several holes, the characters are not fully developed and at times the movie drags. The soundtrack and sound editing are downright distracting.But overall it is a dark view into the world under the communist regime, with its twisted logic and uncontrolled power of those in power. You can spot some dark humour. Surreal with unpredictable results. Nothing happy can come out of these circumstances. It's not a light entertainment, more of a history lesson.
Chris Knipp
Radim Spacek's Walking Too Fast has been described as a "political thriller," but its agenda is different. It has an abstract, absurdist quality that undercuts the suspense and excitement necessary to a thriller. Its mood is deliberately alienating, unlike Von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others, where we are drawn into the most minute details. There are similarities between the two films. Here too there is an intellectual under investigation, Tomás (Martin Finger), a dissident writer, a big, long-haired man with a nice house full of books, a wife, and a mistress, Klara (Kristina Farkasova), a confident and pretty ginger-haired factory-worker. There's not much about what he writes, though, or who his friends are. But he's repeatedly menaced and beaten, his adultery revealed to his wife, who kicks him out. He's offered the opportunity to leave the country with his family, which he initially refuses on moral grounds. There's little about the actual process of surveillance that is so central to Von Donnersmarck's film. This movie seeks primarily to show how the system of repression (it's set in 1982) destroys the people who enforce it, and it does that through a single compelling but repellent character, Antonín (Ondrej Malý), a star operative of the secret police (StB). He falls for the writer's girlfriend Klara, a useless passion that seems to lead to his ultimate meltdown, but most of his time is occupied with senseless violence and menace. Malý is a little, wiry, ferret-like man who resembles an Eastern European Matthieu Amalric. He has Amalric's face with the life and the handsomeness drained from it. He has Amalric's manic intensity but none of his warmth and vulnerability. Instead there's something genuinely scary about him. The film's "suspense" is watching to see what he will do next. Malý, who's in nearly every scene, is the chief reason for watching this movie, which may mean more to Czechs otherwise than to anybody else. They can read worlds into it. Outsiders will miss a convincing story, some excuses for what is going on, for how we get from point A to point B. The movie's structure is solely the structure of Antonín's downward spiral, spurred by discontent with everything, growing physical and psychological problems and his obsession with Klara. As one reviewer, Jason Pirodsky, put it, Antonín is "a Travis Bickle-like sociopath." But instead of being an alienated loner, he's part of the state machine, and he's running off the rails.Walking Too Fast (whose original title Pouta means "The Ties That Bind") omits details about the secret police's intelligence-gathering process. When he pulls in Tomás to an empty, low-ceilinged interrogation room, Antonín says, "Do you know why you're here?" but he doesn't, and Antonín doesn't tell him. We see Antonín and a group of his cohorts getting drunk together -- another stage for unnerving, mad behavior -- and it shows they are afraid of him but don't admire him. Eventually he beats up a lot of people, singlehanded, on screen, but he also has panic attacks, and after burning one man with a cigarette he burns himself too. He carries a plastic bag to breathe into to ease the panic attacks, at least one of which comes in the middle of beating someone. No doubt about it, Antonín isn't having a good time. Walking Too Fast has some of the qualities of a film noir or a whodonit, though its loser protagonist brings his troubles on himself and earns no shred of sympathy from the audience. However this is where Malý's cold intensity as an actor comes in. He makes Antonín an inexplicable force of nature, a man possessed by an energy that's destroying him. Though the beatings are repeated without the sense of a buildup to anything, there are good scenes in Walking Too Fast. The ones where Antonín forces his wife to move out and uselessly corners Klara and proposes an affair are particularly memorable. There's good work from all the cast. Lukas Latinak is fine as Antonín's mellower, tricky Slovak cohort and so is Lubos Vesely as a timid intellectual forced to play informant. I particularly liked the Eighties-ish electronic score by indie musician Tomas Vtipil, which sets up the uneasy mood of the scenes and provides an unsettling jauntiness to the closing credits. The cinematography of Jaromir Kacer is impeccable. I just wish the writer, Ondrej Stindl, had put a dash more humanity and three-dimensionality into the script. Writing ultimately makes or breaks a film and here a little more story logic would have expanded the potential audience. Pouta took home a raft of honors at the Czech version of the Oscars. It has appeared in half a dozen international festivals and opened theatrically in the Czech Republic in February 2010, but it sold fewer than 17,000 tickets. It may have a better life as a DVD when viewers can take breaks from its 142-minute length. Seen and reviewed as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, April 2011.
iva-svobodova2
Yes, in my opinion, Pouta (Ties That Bind) is the best Czech movie of the last twenty years. This movie tells a story about a bad guy who gets attached to a stranger - pretty ginger girl who doesn't even know he exists. Antonín is a bad-ass, a member of secret police (the story is set to the 80's), and he's not a nice guy. He's secretive, reserved and emotionless - and on the edge of madness. And yet he has one passion, this plain ginger girl who is a lover of the man who Antonín monitors. Antonín's disturbed mind tells a lot about communist everyday reality but this is not really psychological movie. It's more like film noir, or dark thriller where you can watch mental decline of one bad-ass who deserves it. Still, the movie is very catchy, witty and satisfying. Try it. You won't be disappointed.
