Charlatan

The script is based on Jan Mikolasek, a Czech healer & herbalist. Hundreds would line up each day at his house seeking treatment for ailments. He ended up serving perhaps a million. His diagnosis came in large part from observing the urine of each person & treating w/herbs. He & his staff were imprisoned for several years through Czech communist authoritarian control of peoples lives in the '50s & '60s (sounds like Russia, Belarus, China, Myanmar today) through loss of freedoms, imprisonment, killings. He died of natural causes in 1973. Unmarried he gave much of his money to charitable causes. Would have liked more history in the script.

Agnieszka Holland has been one of Poland's leading directors for the past few decades. Although she has no particular style, the movies of hers that I've seen were worth seeing. This now includes 2020's "Sarlatán" (sorry, IMDb no longer allows diacritics on consonants, so I can't write the title properly).

The movie tells the true story of Jan Mikolasek, a Czech doctor in the early 20th century whose unorthodox methods caused controversy. When the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia, they forced him to use his methods for them. Later on, the country's Soviet-backed government prosecuted him (his sexual relations with men probably contributed to this).

More than anything, the movie shows a part of history that most people have probably never heard of; I don't know how many people in Czechia and Slovakia know about Mikolasek, and in particular his sexual orientation. All in all, this is a movie that you should check out (can I say "Czech out"?).

Czechoslovakian cinematography is flooded with mindless romantic comedies, so it very refreshing to finally see something with a soul. And oh my, this film is something. Breathtaking acting, both Ivan Trojan and Juraj Loj showed what they can do when they are given space and great script to work with. Characters are deep and meaningful, even the smallest roles left me wandering: Who are you, what is your story? Main character, Jan Mikolásek, has an interesting and unusual personality and definitely can't be seen as "a good guy" but he is not "a bad guy" either. I don't know if i would even call him moraly gray. It is completely left on you, how you choose to see him. Personally I also loved how they choose to portray love between two men, how completely breathtaking and pure their relationship was. Couple of times I was very close to tears. If this is where our cinematography is heading, I am definitely excited and I am looking forward to more films like this. Definitely worth watching. If you are slovak/czech, grab your cinema tickets asap. If not, get hold of a subtitled version and watch it too. Great work of art.

I had never heard of Jan Mikolasek, a herbalist/healer and hero to many Czech people. I strongly feel that would be for the best, or checking your Czech history at the door during the opening credits. In fact I'd add maybe skip the post-movie googling on him, and accept this as a very-loosely-based-on-reality film.

Call it speculative biography.

That said, I found the folk therapy treatments based on urine analysis fascinating, I could almost see that as something to have a revival for a variety of reasons (health-cost widening gaps on top of a general distrust of what the authorities, medical or otherwise, say).

Indeed the day I watched this movie I also read a news story about a California state senator's wife dying with a "partially intact" white mulberry leaf found inside her stomach. Sad, but charlatans are far from a plague of the past.

Despite the title, the film seems to not be so ready to condemn Mikolasek for his quasi-medical endeavors. He is introduced with an almost superhuman power, and there is a notion of a burning need to share that power with the people.

The scenes with his mentor underscore a commitment to altruism, beneath a fervent religious belief. There is some joy to those scenes, and fun with lighting as well. Mikolasek inherits a lot of his mentor's skills, however the altruism and spirituality come with conflictions.

He lives a life of apparently both affluence and asceticism. Sitting at night for a tasty feast, kneeling the next day upon the rocks before a statue of Christ.

The conflictions in the film are expanded to his sexuality, in Holland's account there is no question to the homeopath's homosexuality. Like I said, speculative biography. That sexuality puts him at risk not just in the church, but in the eyes of state. Even as the state of the state changes.

Speaking of the state, the healer's efforts don't only lead to long lines of desperate people outside Mikolasek's stately gated home, but interest from their leaders/occupiers.

He survives thanks to his concoctions and connections. But after a stretch of time, will his friends in powerful places turn a more cowardly shade of yellow? Will the good non-doctor suffer the same shady fate?

Again I think the film is well worth a watch especially the efforts of father and son actors covering the ages of Jan. The camera shots work harder than the communists to frame Mikolasek (so many shots through gates/doorways/prison cells and other rectangles within the rectangular screen).

A mild caution on some of the brutality in the film, there are three scenes where a harsh choice of life/death is thrust upon us. A gun, a sack and and an abortifacient - while the middle may trouble other viewers the most, the third shook me.

Over the course of the movie, I felt that Holland may have tried to stack too much upon the shoulders of Mikolasek in this his reel life, but then again he apparently was a larger-than-life to many in his real life.

The biographical film Sarlatan is good, it is worth seeing because it describes the life and destiny of an interesting and controversial character. The life of the main character is totally atypical and includes both good and evil. On the one hand he was completely dedicated to the work of a healer, treating 200 people a day of all kinds of diseases, on the other hand he was a sadomasochist, with accents of madness when torturing and killing animals or when self-mutilating or with accents of murderer when he proposes to the man he lived with to kill his unborn child... A person with extraordinary abilities but also with an obvious mental and emotional imbalance. It bothered me that the film did not show clearly what was the situation of the character towards the end of his life, namely the fact that he was sentenced to 5 years in prison and not killed and that after his release he did not deal with healing.