Up and Down

Up and Down, a Czech film from director Jan Hrebejk (Divided We Fall), has two interconnecting plots: two separate and complicated stories that touch at certain points, in a manner that emphasizes randomness and the fact nothing is really under anyone’s control. It’s a post-totalitarian sensibility, wary and roughly humorous, where anything is liable to happen as long as it’s bad — which isn’t necessarily unrealistic.

The first story concerns Franta, an ex-con and skinhead soccer hooligan with a mushy speech defect that probably comes from being punched in the mouth once too often, and his mousy wife Mila who’s obsessed with having a baby. Mila is infertile, and Franta’s record means they can’t adopt, so they buy a black market baby from a shady pawnshop owner. The infant belongs to an illegal immigrant from India; the whole affair must be kept from both the law and Franta’s crypto-fascist soccer club, which would never accept him having a brown baby.

The second story is about a man named Martin who, after 20 years in Australia, returns home to visit his mother and ailing father. The parents are separated, the father living with his young mistress — who happens to be Martin’s ex-girlfriend — and their 18-year-old daughter. During a long reunion dinner with the four of them, Martin’s cantankerous mother ensures that the initial air of forced civility turns into one of unbridled grievance. Hrebejk and his co-writer Petr Jarchovsky have concocted an uneven but sadly funny film that, at its best moments, harks back to the mid-’60s golden age of the Czech cinema when this sort of funky social satire briefly flourished before the inevitable Soviet clampdown.

Richard C. Walls writes about film for Metro Times. E-mail [email protected].