Watch Marketa Lazarová For Free

Truly Dreadful Film

Just perfect...

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

What works for this film has critics and viewers losing track of what doesn't. I agree with all the praise heaped on for the cinematography. As a work of visual art, this film certainly deserves its place in the list of the greatest. For that alone, I stayed with it far beyond the point of giving up on knowing who was who and what was happening to them. But, for an almost three hour movie, I need something to grasp other than great visual stimulation because that can't sustain my interest for three hours alone without some sort of tangible idea or story. There is a story here, somewhere, but unfortunately, since so many of the characters look alike, and the editing makes it impossible to tell whether you're seeing flashbacks or just moving to new scenes, and the dialog offers no help in delineating the plot, I could only tell that some medieval people were trying to kill each other--something about a robbery, but then the robber seems to have caught another robber robbing the same people and took him hostage, other people got away and were taken hostage, who I couldn't figure out, someone's daughter is a nun, maybe, or a pagan witch, or some convoluted excuse to show her naked--in other words, the story is an absolute mess. Others have praised what they call a "non-linear plot." I don't mind a non-linear plot at all, but for this film, the phrase is no better than an excuse for bad story-telling.

I found this Czech film listed in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, it is one of only a few films that have got attention or reviews from critics, so I just watched to make my own mind up about it. Basically set in the Middle Ages, two brothers, Mikolás (Frantisek Velecký) and one-armed Adam (Ivan Palúch) are robbers who steal from travellers for their tyrannical father Kozlík (Josef Kemr). During one of their "jobs", they end up having to hold a young German hostage, the hostage's father escapes and reports the news of her kidnapping and the robbery to the King. Kozlík is prepared for the wrath of the King, he sends Mikolás to pressure his neighbour Lazar (Michal Kozuch) to join him in war, the persuasion fails, and in vengeance Mikolás abducts Lazar's virginal, naive daughter Marketa Lazarová (Magda Vásáryová), just as she was about to join a convent to become a nun. In the meantime, the King dispatches an army, and Lazar who is religious will be called upon to join hands against Kozlík. I will be honest and say that I did not understand absolutely everything going on, but there is a plot about the shift from Paganism to Christianity. Also starring Zdenek Kryzánek as Captain Beer and Pavla Polaskova as Alexandra, with narration by Zdenek Stepánek. Even though I couldn't follow everything because I had to read subtitles, this black-and-white film set in medieval times had some good moments, with themes of religion, kidnapping by robbers and the hostage becoming the mistress of one of the kidnappers being interesting, maybe if critics wrote a review I could make more of a determined judgement, for me it was a reasonable historical drama. Worth watching!

Some of the most rewarding film experiences I know of annotate the medium itself, oftentimes than not so elliptically it's almost impossible to see at first. I don't mean Fellini's "8 ½" (1963) or "F for Fake" (1974) and their ilk; these are explicitly self-referential films, not that there's anything wrong in that. The films I am referring to aren't really self-referentially about film on narrative level, rather about something else entirely; they become film allegories by extension, as if in the periphery, accidentally."Marketa Lazarová" (1967), so audaciously otherworldly, is a film like that. I've seen it twice now, and slowly it's starting to reveal its riches. The first time around my expectations misled me to approach it as something closer to Tarkovsky's "Andrei Rublev" (1966), and while there are similarities, the film is so radical it's not that fitting a comparison in my mind.The backdrop for the film is a profound historical and cultural paradigm shift where Christianity and paganism battle it out. Two opposites, the film can be seen as a poetic exploration of this struggle, and thus as a social document. While interesting, something else speaks to me more. For me the two allegorical forces at play are those of image and sound, and their use in film world, in filmic language. They often go their own ways, images showing us something and the narration swerving to somewhere else altogether, and the complex array of characters and their unorthodox introduction and presentation in the film underline the effect of confusion very powerfully. The overdubbed, echoing dialogue, often out of sync with the image, distracted me on first viewing, but it's unmistakably fitting in the grand scheme of things. Some images are so powerful I can't get them out of my mind (not that I'd want to, mind you!) And the music! It's the highest compliment I can think of when I say for a film so visually rich that you should not only see it but listen to it. Liska's contribution to the film in some ways contributes to the modest thesis I've been trying to form in so short a space, that is the wonderful interplay of sound and image. Kieslowski's "Trois couleurs: Bleu" (1993) might compare if I wanted to search for something as equally stunning as this.And I can't write about the film without mentioning the most wonderful sound I've come across in film. It's the convent bell, and one can hear it towards the very beginning, during the revelation and just before the intertitles, I think, and I think it's repeated at least once later on.All in all, what an experience. We're lucky to have two Blu-rays of the film, the first a Czech Region B, the second a Criterion Region A release. The first one does have English subtitles.

I can only add my voice to the other reviewers, asking why such a masterpiece, voted the best Czech film of all time, is not available on DVD or VHS, especially since two of the director's lesser films did make it to VHS. Another Vlacil film (just as unique in its own way) that is not available is The White Dove. Marketa Lazarova is very realistic in detail (as other reviewers have remarked), but (unlike some recent American and British films set in the Middle Ages) it does not make a fetish of the dirt and squalor. The cruelty is also shown in the context of a harsh world, where revenge and displays of power were necessary to maintain one's position. And it goes with the sardonic humor of the film. The only knight in shining armor, for instance, is an ineffectual status symbol. But the film also portrays a conflict in which both sides have their virtues: the bonds of family affection and loyalty in the outlaw clan, which come out in the father's final scene with his dying son; and the king's effort to maintain some semblance of order that will allow ordinary people to live their lives. By contrast, most American and British medieval epics are fantasies, featuring a struggle between stereotyped good versus evil characters.