The drama City on the River, co-produced by the Czechs, was a hit in Latvia a year earlier, with over 60,000 viewers there. Now showing in Czech cinemas.

Director Viesturs Kairišs is based on the dismal history of his own country, which managed to have its own dictator during the Second World War, then was occupied by the Soviet Union, then Nazi Germany and again by the Soviets. However, the film’s hero, Ansis, sees this historical movement more as a backdrop against which he paints his portrait. With a sincere deer expression, which is a sign of inner purity or cowardice and unwillingness to have an opinion on anything.

At the same time, the tense atmosphere is reflected in Ansis’ life from the very beginning, for example when he meets the Jewish Zisla and his rich father chases the protagonist out of his doorstep. But then the wheels of history started turning, people changed coats, Zisla returned as a friend, Ansis already had another girl and also had to paint other marks on the walls, which was her livelihood.

The play Town on the River uses the naive perspective of the protagonist, who sometimes resembles Otík from the Menzel films The village has a center, and portrays history as a play with absurd parameters. The director himself admitted that he was inspired by the Czechoslovak new wave, especially the work of Jiří Menzel and Miloš Forman.

While Ansis was painting an inscription in the alphabet one moment and painting a swastika the next, the ruling parties took turns in stylized images that resembled a carefully arranged living painting. The passionate Klezmer plays in contrast to the dark political events.

Characters and characters meet amid a stream of major historical epics, but director and screenwriter Kairišs is sometimes too eager to emulate his model, among which he further counts writer Gabriel García Márquez, especially the comprehensive magical-realist chronicle One Hundred Years of Solitude. In River City, the rich become poor, the oppressed become powerful, and vice versa.

At a crucial moment, the picture slows down, the heroes sail down the river on a boat, as if frozen in time, which suddenly flows like thick honey – that the absurd nature of the tragic wartime cannot be captured in any other way? But in the end, the creative process is as simple and transparent as protagonist Ansis’ perspective.

Many Czechs worked on the film, he took home four statues of the Latvian version of the Czech Lions, including one for the screenplay. And two belonged to domestic crew members. Brigita Cmuntová, who played Zisla, won the award for best actress, and sound engineers Ludvík K. Bohadlo and Robert Slezák of the studio Sleepwalker won the award for best sound.

Despite a certain rigor, City on the River can easily approach Czech audience tastes precisely because it reminds us of some ancient snippets from our film history. While today’s local historical dramas with prize-winning ambitions, namely Masaryk-type pictures, try to portray major political figures in a very ambivalent way, Latvian directors tell about history through the lens of ordinary people. And he doesn’t want to show dark times in a dark way, instead, he constructs a clear, clear, if already somewhat exaggerated contrast, where exaggeration shows the movement of time as endlessly strange.

Ansis dipped her brush and could console herself in the fact that her situation would never escalate to the point where she herself was unwelcome. He just painted over green to red, drew a red star on the coat of arms, started writing with cockroaches. At the same time, he could not be called a coward or a collaborator. The world flows over him like a blank canvas. But as the camera sees, often capturing the world at a slight angle, from unusual angles suggests, perhaps it wasn’t just the politics of the time that were bent: the behavior of most people who had to survive in such chaos was crooked as well.

After all, the riverside town is the complete opposite of the complicated Czech historical drama. While the latter ends in ambiguity to defy any interpretation, the Latvian picture is clear. Too simple.