Bohemia, the middle ages, winter. The one-armed Adam and his brother Mikolas attack and rob a caravan. Their outlaw father Kozlik raised all his seventeen children to be robbers, as they live in a decrypt settlement in the wild. However, this time, they robbed the wrong one: the kidnapped victim Kristian has a rich father, a German Bishop, who orders the king’s captain to hunt for Kozlik. Mikolas wanted to kill the rival scavenger Lazar, but spares him when the latter prays to God and displays his beautiful daughter, Marketa. When Mikolas asks Lazar for help, since the captain’s army is coming, Mikolas is beaten by Lazar’s men. In an ambush, Mikolas takes revenge when his henchmen crucify Lazar on a door. Mikolas rapes Marketa, who falls in love with him. In a raid by the captain, many are killed and Kozlik is arrested, but Kristian flees because he fell in love with Alexandra, Kozlik’s daughter. Marketa is brought in front of a wounded Mikolas and marries him before he dies.
"Marketa Lazarova" is one of those hermetic art-films which are objectively very good and ambitious, yet are not very entertaining and you privately never have the urge to see them again. Proclaimed by some local film critics as “the best Czech film of all times”, "Marketa" wasn’t in reality even the best Czech film of 1967 (that honor belongs to Lipsky’s "Happy End"), yet it is a surreal, somber, dark depiction of primitivism of the middle ages, with symbolic themes in which an entire society could have been raised wrong, in this case the outlaw Kozlik who educated his seventeen kids to be robbers, akin to the family of freaks in "The Hills Have Eyes", while he clashes with the captain’s army who represents law and order, and can thus be seen as a clash between paganism and Christianity; wildness and restraint; maybe even the Soviet Union and the Western world. One great moment is undeniably owned by the captain who was hired by the king, and thus has this golden exchange with a skeptic man: "Since when has the king bothered with poor yeomen?" - "Even a king must drive flies from his face."
The title heroine is surprisingly only a supporting character, while the movie meanders between several episodes and other characters. However, at times, the cinematography is exquisite, and elevates certain scenes: for instance, the camera drive over a tree with four hawks standing on branches, up to Marketa turned away from the camera, who then turns facing the camera; or the stylistic shot of Kristian exiting a fence and walking between a dozen wolves that just stand motionlessly there, as if in a trance. If there is one spiritual mentor to the film, it would be Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev”, while both owe to Dreyer’s dry aesthetics interwoven with religious elements. Several scenes of cruelty and brutality may disturb, such as the flashback in which Adam’s hand was chopped off for punishment because he had an incestuous relationship with his sister, or the “stop motion” tracking shot of an arrow flying into a man’s eye. “Marketa Lazarova” is overrated and overlong (with a running time of almost three hours), yet it contemplates about the fragility of life during dark times, and some of its expressionistic images stay in your head.
Grade:+++
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