Charlatan

By: Amos Lassen

"CHARLATAN"

Fighting Illness

Amos Lassen

"Charlatan" is a historic drama from Agnieszka Holland, which is "loosely" inspired by the life of Czech herbalist Jan Mikolásek and is firmly in the impact of constant regime change on individual citizens. Mikolásek (Ivan Trojan) may not have been a charlatan in the medical sense, whatever his opponents may have suggested. We see that saving the lives of many stands in positive relief against his flaws in terms of his personal life and interactions. There are moments when Mikolásek is so casually monstrous, particularly when it comes to his assistant-turned-lover Frantisek Palko (Juraj Loj) and the wife he has elsewhere. This is mirrored by his work, with his diagnoses being given after he looks at vials of human urine.

Starting near the end of the story, Marek Epstein's script goes back and forth in time, encompassing Mikolásek's traumatic experiences of the Second World War before learning his trade from an elderly woman (Jaroslava Pokorná). Alongside the daily queues of regular citizens that await his treatment, we also see his ministering to everyone from Nazis to Czech president Antonín Zápotocký, the death of whom is a catalyst for Mikolásek's enemies to take him before the court on trumped up charges.

Unfortunately, the script, however, shows the stiffness of Mikolásek, so that though the director and stars bring an excitement to the relationship between Palko and his boss (the most fictional element of the plot) causing the script to fall short showing what lies beneath. The film is amazing in terms of dramatic sweep but on a personal level but it's frustrating as Mikolásek remains a stubborn enigma to end.

Holland has based her antihero on the historical figure of Mikolasek, and takes us through his epic life and eventual downfall.He tells is that his "life's mission has been to fight illness with nature's weapons" and so he diagnoses illness by assessing the state of people's urine. It seems that he has treated just about everyone for one ailment or other and some patients will cross his path again in fateful ways.

Mikolasek came to nature's healing powers from an early age, he apprenticed with a local woman who was considered to be s a witch by villagers. He endures the First World War and flirts with Nazi collaboration in order to survive the Second. Suspicion and envy are everywhere around him. The postwar communist regime finally brings him down as does his forbidden affair with his handsome, married, and much younger assistant is something that Stalinist Czechoslovakia will not accept.

We sense an air of poetic isolation around Mikolasek by seeing him through frames and prisms, an artful technique but it distances us from a man who already difficult to like. We see him correcting, lecturing, or withholding something from others. For someone who \ lives to heal people, he doesn't seem to like actual people very much, and it comes as no surprise to see him fall into those who seek revenge. His prideundermines the political point that Holland wants to make about the evils of totalitarian tyranny. We can easily imagine Mikolasek getting in trouble in more open political systems than communism. The film opens up the question of when pride crosses the line between noble pursuit and fatal blind spot.

There is also a sense of inevitability throughout the film. The film also manages to balance war and persecution with homosexual romance and does so beautifully.