[Film Review] Case for a Rookie Hangman (1970) 8.0/10
A less extolled eminent figure of Czech New Wave, Pavel Jurácek (1935-1989), notably recognized as the scribe contributing to significant works like Vera Chytilová’s DAISIES (1966) and Jindřich Polák’s VOYAGE TO THE END OF THE UNIVERSE (1963), only bequeaths posterity with two feature films as the director, but it is hardly his fault, after CASE FOR A ROOKIE HANGMAN is banned by his country, which also truncates his movie career entirely.
This ill-fated one-hit-wonder is nominally an adaptation of Jonathan Swift’s GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, but by positing a suit-clad hare as the main agent to jump-start its idiosyncratic plot, it also reminisces of Lewis Carroll’s ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND. Starting as a surreal trip down the memory lane after a bizarre car accident, Lemuel Gulliver (Kostelka) fetches up in the territory of Barnibarbi, a fictitious Mitteleuropean country practicing unorthodox social mores, among other things, every Monday is “silence day”, thence no one is allowed to talk on that day,
Gulliver enters his rabbit hole with utter befuddlement and resignation, having taken a pocket watch from the dead hare, he is mistaken by the people in Barnibarbi as Oscar, the prince of Laputa, which is a rarified realm floating aloft, where dwelling the venerated king of Barnibarbi, finally Gulliver is granted a visit to Laputa through a lofty tower, but it is far from the Ruritania one might imagine, the king has spirited away in Monte Carlo (as a bellhop no less) for more than a decade, upon his return terra firma, the truth stings, he is assaulted by governor of Barnibarbi (Hálek), and must find a way to flee this crazed land.
Foregrounding the story’s Kafkaesque machinations and non-sequitur peculiarities, Jurácek spectacularly eventuates a deceptively freewheeling journey through its memorable mise-en-scène (a nightmarish sequence with mobile floor boards), daringly swift editing choices (a vertical plunge to a door on the floor magically follows by a door opening horizontally to a study) and whimsical chiaroscuro deployment, not to mention Lubos Fiser’s brilliantly emotional incidental music, accompanying Gulliver’s increasingly exasperated fish-out-of-water existence among alienness, illogicality, reality-and-dream blurring displacement, his deceased childhood sweetheart Marketa (Jerneková) is reincarnated as a giggling princess, intermittently pops up and titillates him, yet every time, he wakes up with the same bedfellow in the person of a sultry Dominika (Zahrynowska).
Prima facie, Jurácek’s strangely enrapturing feature can be patly construed as an allegorical tool leveling at the autocratic government at then, with its symbolic innuendos and the depiction of a tinpot monarchy and a seeming utopia in the throe of high-handed surveillance and hypocrisy, but if we peel it off its ambiguous messages, what in the kernel is indeed, a fantastically configured fairytale totally devoid of the usual Hollywood triteness and affectation, archly cynical, beguilingly inexplicable, and capriciously surprising, Jurácek competently sinks his teeth into actualizing this lollapalooza, were it not for the deplorable suppression from the Establishment, he could have become a major player in the world cinema, alas, bless we still have CASE FOR A ROOKIE HANGMAN to quench the ire.
referential entries: Vera Chytilová’s DAISIES (1966, 7.6/10); Jaromil Jires’ VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS (1970, 6.9/10).