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Review

This Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film is a sweetly rendered fable about a washed-up, middle-aged classical cellist and compulsive womanizer who's struggling to make ends meet in 1988 Prague. Having been booted off the state Philharmonia for having too many close relatives who've "immigrated" to the West, Frantisek Louka (Sverak) ekes out a living by playing funerals and touching up gravestones. Out of desperation, he agrees to a fake marriage to a Russian émigré for a substantial sum of money. Louka finds himself up a tree, however, when she splits town leaving him with her 5-year-old boy, Kolya (Chalimon), and a suspicious police inspector who seems determined to lock him up. Kolya, of course, is a simple story and though it doesn't cover any new ground, its charm lies in Louka's gradual warming to fatherhood (or grandfatherhood as it were) as set against Prague's gradual warming to the Velvet Revolution. Ultimately, the film avoids the maudlin trap and delivers a tender and subtly profound look at the latter days of Communism and Soviet occupation in the Czech Republic. (Czech with English subtitles)