Havel’s film debut premieres amid grudgingly negative reviews

The film version of Václav Havel’s play Leaving hits the silver screen tonight, with premieres at Lucerna Palace (which his grandfather designed, incidentally) and Slovanský Dům. The former president and playwright has said that directing a film was a dream of his and ‘Leaving’ is the first fruit of his cinematic labour. But pre-release reviews have thrown cold water on the big expectations around the film. Earlier today we spoke with Theo Schwinke, the Eastern European correspondent for the multimedia magazine Screen International who was among the first to see the film, and asked him to tell us more.

'Leaving'

“The film’s about a politician, oddly enough – a politician named Vilém Rieger, and we meet him when he is stepping down from the chancellorship of a country which is never named in the film. So there’s a little bit of a political drama there, but the real story starts when Rieger finds out that the country’s new political leaders are insisting that he and his family leave the official residence – they’re losing their home. So, what happens over the course of the story is that Rieger’s friends and his advisors and his family all sort of turn against him when they realise they are losing all the power and the privileges that they used to enjoy, and all the action takes place at this villa – on the veranda outside this villa.”

All that seems to say quite a lot about Mr Havel himself, even though he has said it is not an autobiographical story. There’s this conniving successor and the common-law wife who is played by Mr Havel’s real-life wife… What can be gleaned from the film about Mr Havel’s personal feelings about these subjects?

Václav Havel

“Well it’s really hard to guess from the film what Havel’s personal feeling about all these things actually are, and I think that’s one of the things that’s so frustrating about it, for me at any rate, because I think the film was an opportunity for, let’s say, a great man, Václav Havel, to tell us what he really thinks – about politics, about personal life – and all we really get from this film is that he thinks that politics is a dirty business and politicians are frail and faulty human beings like the rest of us.”

Apparently there were even more disappointing things about the film for a lot of the people who have reviewed it. The play was received quite well when it premiered three years ago, particularly by Czech reviewers – slightly less so by international reviewers, but now most of the reviews seem to be begrudgingly negative – between the lines one reads that if it were anyone other than Havel, they would probably be panning it outright. So why the discrepancy between the way the film and the play have been received?

Josef Abrhám, Jaroslav Dušek (right)

“Oh, well, you can’t believe everything you read in the reviews, can you? [laughs] The problem with the play is… well actually that’s it: it’s still a play. It’s not a film, it’s still just a play. And film and theatre are very, very different art forms. Film is a visual medium, it’s more like still photography than theatre; theatre relies so much more on dialogue. And this is a very, very ‘talky’ play. If you’re going to adapt a play for the big screen you have to change it visually – you have to make it a series of moving pictures. And the problem with ‘Leaving, the film’ is that it’s almost completely unchanged, it’s almost an exact reproduction of ‘Leaving, the play’.”

Well, as you say, critics are often wrong… What you personally think about the film overall, do you think it’s a disaster when compared with the kind of expectations people had for it, or are there some positive things that can be said about it as well?

“Eh, would this be a good time to say ‘I love you Mr Former President’? [laughs] I’ve certainly seen worse Czech films than this one. But, honestly, it’s a bit of a train wreck. I mean, what’s good about it… the costumes are fun. There are some good performances. Jaroslav Dušek is good in this film – he’s good in everything. Miroslav Krobot is absolutely fantastic, he doesn’t have a whole lot to do here, but there are no small roles only small players, and Miroslav Krobot is a great actor. Táňa Vilhelmová plays sort of a ‘vamp’ character in the film and that’s good. But all of the characters are sort of comic caricatures, and so the actors can only do so much with them.”

Josef Abrhám, Dagmar Havlová

Václav Havel is really very well received abroad, so how do you think international audiences will respond to the film?

“I hope they respond by sending him get-well cards. It’s great that he’s out of the hospital and is going to be able to attend the premiere and support the film. I think internationally people are going to be curious to see what this film is about. Any film made by a political statesman like this is bound to attract some international attention, but run-of-the-mill audiences I don’t think are going to get a chance to see it, because it’s going to be filtered through festivals and buyers, and nobody’s going to be able to make any money off the film so no one’s going to be able to take it to cinemas in, say, north America or Britain or anything like that. Broad distribution in theatres is not going to happen.”