Revelatory Inebriation and Westward Projections: Bolek Polívka’s Father Figures in Mid-2000s Czech Cinema

Abstract

In the mid-2000s, prominent Czech actor Bolek Polívka played palpably flawed father figures in the films Pupendo (2003) and Something Like Happiness (2005). Polívka’s patresfamilias iterate the tendencies of alcohol consumption and antiheroism common for portrayals of masculinity in Czech texts in these films, which reflect post-communist attitudes about current affairs and perspectives on the former regime. This paper applies theories pertaining to regional literature and national cinemas to explore Polívka’s peculiar roles as father figures responding to local social codes and notions about the West. The analysis assesses Polívka’s select patresfamilias against characters from his prior films as well as familiar figures in the Czech cultural canon, e.g. Josef Švejk. The discussion also proposes an understanding of alcohol use in Pupendo and Something Like Happiness as a narrative device that brings about instances of intimacy and revelation. Polívka’s acting engenders moments of truth that clarify his characters’ stances and align them with narrative developments of both films. In accordance with concentrating on the actor, this paper accounts for the complexity that Polívka’s off-screen persona and local success add to his characters.

Keywords:

• Czech
• film
• post-communism
• Bolek Polívka
• Normalization
• national cinema
• alcohol

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my colleagues from Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan as well as my fellow panelists at the Association for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies conference in 2022. Their input about earlier iterations of this article was crucial to its development.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Miloš Forman, the most internationally successful New Wave auteur, has repeatedly credited the authors Jaroslav Hašek and Franz Kafka and as influencers for the Czechs’ survivalist sense of humor (Kopaněvová 1997, 181; Gelmis 1971, K6). Sláma would later attempt to direct an adaption of The Good Soldier Švejk starring Pavel Líška, who plays Toník in Something Like Happiness, as Josef Švejk.

2 ‘Opilé banány’ means ‘drunk bananas’ in English (there is no official English title for the book by Šabach). The film Pelišky (Cozy Dens, 2000) by Hřebejk and Jarchovský, in which Polívka plays a supporting role, is also loosely based on Šabach’s stories.

3 An earlier conception of the film’s initial shots prior to the opening credits was meant to show the ‘Czech basin,’ a geographic feature that acts as a metaphor for the nation’s inward tendencies (Jarchovský 2001, 3).

4 The Pupendo screenplay draft describes the school mosaic scene furnished with an empty bottle of vodka and half-finished bottle of Mára’s wine (Jarchovský 2001, 61). Though the realized scene turned out differently, it is apparent that the filmmakers sought to explicitly employ alcohol to set its tone.

5 Veronika Pehe describes some of the Czech cultural specificities of heroism, citing Jiří Rak’s point about the nation’s tendency to celebrate ‘simple’ people amid a lack of aristocracy and cases of employing the term hero (hrdina) pejoratively (2020, 34).

6 Čech’s Brouček stories were later adapted into a popular opera by Leoš Janáček.

7 Mára’s feelings about the post-1968 atmosphere in Czechoslovakia in Pupendo connect to patterns Peiker points out about Soviet-era literary descriptions of Moscow, which ‘is not frequent as the embodiment of centeredness, probably because it was perceived more as a centre of power than of prestige, and thus did not quite qualify as the place of “cultural universality”’(2006, 4).

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Tanya Silverman

Tanya Silverman is Ph.D. Candidate in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. She focuses her research on Czech cinema and its interactions with literature.