"You want to kill me now that I love you?"
An avant-garde film from Vera Chytilová that is visually stunning and narratively challenging. It obviously relates to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, as we get psychedelic imagery in an explosion of colors that tell us the Biblical story in the first nine and a half minutes, and I think, specifically, the loss of innocence based on fateful decisions about adultery. I know Chytilová resisted being called a feminist, but I also see feminism here in how she contorted the meaning of the parable from Genesis.
The story which follows the intro is a love triangle between a young woman, Eva (Jitka Nováková), her husband Josef (Karel Novák), and a mysterious man in red velvet, Robert (Jan Schmid), who almost pees on her accidentally when he first meets her. Eva is aware that her husband is cheating on her when he's secretive about letters he's received from other women, and in an important moment, asks him "do you think you'll tell me the truth some day?" to which he just laughs. Meanwhile, she's intrigued while watching Robert cavort with a variety of other women. Fully tempted, she chases after Robert but beguilingly, he doesn't give in to her initially, and the crisis builds over the course of the film. (Let's just forget about a third man, the waiter from the café she flirts with, which is another sign of her awakened agency and sexuality).
Aside from the beautiful imagery, trying to decode the film is part of the experience. When Eva ends up in Robert's apartment, for example, she discovers evidence that he might be a serial killer, at least if taken literally. Personally I thought it was a reference to him being a lady killer, e.g. "killing" someone through sexual conquest, playing with their heart and leaving them, stripping away a layer of purity and innocence in the process. When she asks him to "kill" her on that little rowboat, the gorgeous light on the water rippling hypnotically in the background, I think this is the sense of it, but I'm sure there are other interpretations.
The Eve in this story is one whose tree of knowledge seems to be that of sexual freedom, in particular because her husband has already played around. The relationship she has with Robert is more than just a fling, however, and their slow circling on the barren ground, tossing the gun back and forth while contemplating love and trust, reminded me of Leonard Cohen's Dance Me to the End of Love. Her husband is then shocked when he sees what she's done and she tells him "Don't ask for the truth" repeatedly, an interesting play on the Lord's requirement about the tree of knowledge, and then she says "Just as I refuse to ask for it, too," reflecting her own willful blind eye. Through religious inspired music, the soundtrack then soars to deliver the words from Genesis, which seem to mean something so different in this context. While Eva has sinned, she certainly wasn't the first, and is surrounded by an adulterous husband and a libertine lover.
It's a fascinating film, one that took some thinking about and rewatching to fully appreciate, and still had me puzzling as I tried to cobble together a review. Regardless, it's strongest in its final half hour, as scenes like the one with the members of the spa bouncing the ball up into the air and chasing after it went in the middle of the film were too long and felt a little pretentious - so if you find it a little tough going, my advice is to stick with it.
