Candidate

I'm in a meeting and thus had a review ready in my head that will hate the film in spite of lobbing it a four-star rating and a joyous review, as opposed to just giving it three stars. If Candidate appealed to me on principle, I can counter any attack with "yes, I'm fine with the pointless visual opulence, the out-of-focus characters leaving the scene in extreme slow motion, the unnecessary camera tilts, and the infantile refocusing from macro to long without any narrative anchor" (a.k.a. that's what’s getting shot for us now that we've taken the spoils from RED, right). But so what, if no one else can do this in the post-Czechoslovakia (props to the exceptions), what am I supposed to do? Karásek's debut is a commercial drenched not only in story, but above all in stylization, which is revoltingly clean, squelching through simple shapes, designer interiors, perfectly composed shots, and the power of gesture versus the power of words. So it actually sucks that it had to waste its time with such a local, uninventive, and overwrought plot, piled with characters I cared more about even less than any future presidential election. Especially in Slovakia. Not to mention the monstrous (Slovakian) postsynchronization: whenever the form manages to detach you from that malignant provinciality, it always drags you brutally back down to earth. And kicks you in the head. (10/07/2014)

Candidate is surprisingly not a bad satire. It is formally precise (except for the sound) but not self-serving – its editing and visual filters are there to convey the superficial charm of the world of commercials where it takes place. Its humor is scarce but witty and to the point. It’s the first time we get to see those Czech-Slovak jokes we’ve been waiting for (the MacDonald’s scene is the best) and it’s done so tastefully that both Czechs and Slovaks will laugh. The main character is charismatic and believable and Marek Majeský is a good fit for the role. Candidate is a very Slovak film, but I don’t mean that as an insult. It reflects hiding the absence of wit behind “glamorous” values, good marketing and dubious politics. However, I won’t give it a fourth star because I’m not sure this was done consciously. I have these doubts also because of the would-be surprising final point, which was forcibly added to the film so that the audience feels the need to discuss the ending with the filmmakers. (27/02/2014)

I wasn't expecting this. The Czech-Slovak relatively independent film surprisingly presents a very well-developed story that works and which you quite believe in, even though it is relatively minimalist and focused only on a few characters, despite being about the choice of president. This is the kind of stuff that should get wider distribution and into movie theaters, not just on TV where it gets forgotten. (09/05/2016)

It’s not that it’s free of pure WTF moments, supported by powerful, completely non-conceptual Czech post-synchrony (the etudes of Bishop Joseph feel like passages from Vatican porn). But if you are waiting for a naive tabloid sump like Catch a Billionaire / Kajínek, you will be disappointed, because this film was made by a) people who obviously have experience with the marketing and advertising environment, b) people who can write a solid dialogue here and there, c) people who can more or less make movies (I'm not saying that they do a good job at it). Formally, of course, we are talking about a very hard-working derivative on the border between cappuccino advertising and an imitation of Tony Scott. In terms of the screenplay, these are two very laboriously patchworked storylines, one of which feels more like a factory for humor and the promo for the voice and face of Michal Dlouhý, the other like a forced construction of a political thriller in realities that do not do it any good. It is an amorphous conglomeration of motifs that are individually interesting, sometimes even having certain critical potential, but together they seem like rash chatter about the essence of contemporary political marketing, and so on. When you decipher the individual layers and filter out the nonsense, you are left with a trivial story with a very trivial message. Candidate tries to pretend that there is something more to it, but it is best captured by the "nonsense" of the following SPOILER connection: the Slovak Kennedy and a descendant of Štúr. The film simply behaves similarly to the main character - it does everything with effect, and where the effect doesn't help, it takes on even more effect. The characters often give the impression that they don't actually react to the world around them and move on simply because the script requires them to (it is as if Coppola’s The Conversation completely gave up the main character's mental suffering and focused only on the content of the wiretaps). As a result, the superficiality has no critical / ironic corrective. I never once felt that Candidate was insulting my intelligence, but I also never felt that the film was stimulating it in any way. The most positive thing I can say about the film is that in the given genre, there’s probably nothing better that has been created in Czechoslovakia. And that's really too little. (19/02/2014)

I have a feeling that the Slovak cinematography has been improving in the last two years. And as is often the case, the Czechs are involved, even though they didn’t show off much with their own movies this year. Anyhow, hats off to the Slovaks. Candidate is such an apt satire of today’s politics that it made me nauseous. (07/12/2014)