Aloïs Nebel

The Czech Republic's (or is it now Czechia?) submission to the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film focuses on a man whose memories haunt him during a crucial point in the country's history. Tomás Lunák's* rotoscoped "Alois Nebel" has as its protagonist a man working at a train station on the Polish border in 1989. He remembers the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. He begins to suffer hallucinations, but it's never totally clear what's real and what isn't, even as the Soviet-backed regime collapses and Havel's government takes over.

This is one of the most haunting movies that I've ever seen. The animation is done like a graphic novel (and in fact is based on a trilogy of graphic novels), with everything made to look dismal. Even if a lot of the content is a cultural thing, you can't deny that they made one outstanding movie here. I recommend it.

*For some reason, IMDb no longer lets users write diacritical marks on consonants.

"Alois Nebel" is an intriguing Czech melodrama which unfolds amidst the backdrop of the collapse of socialism in the country in the late 1980's and a train station platform-set rape incident which happened during World War Two catching up on the then-present day. Despite these ambitious ideas, it works surprisingly well as a low-level drama about a mentally ill man who doesn't seem to be able to find pleasure in life; who lives the sort of existence where time just seems to tick by, where you might find yourself staring out of a window at nothing in particular, where people and events just seem to take their course around you. It operates on two strands, even managing to briefly overlap them, in its telling of its story, one of which is why this character is so upset, and is, on the whole, a satisfying piece of drama film-making.

"Alois Nebel" is, in this sense, a very Czech film to the extent it tackles probably the two major points of interest relevant to the nation of Czechoslovakia within the twentieth century and does so, unsurprisingly, in a very stern, stiff, serious way. Broadly speaking, the film centres on a man from whom the film derives its title, Alois Nebel (Miroslav Krobot), who is somebody approaching the autumn of his life in the autumn of 1989 as the decade, plus a ruling ideology, enters their respective winters. Nebel is not the most stimulating of protagonists, but his back-story and the events that happen to him over the winter of 1989-90 make for interesting viewing none-the-less. He is haunted, if you will, by a kind of PTSD which is only very slowly revealed to us through ghostly flashbacks; something which has the film, despite it taking place in the real-world and dealing with some incredibly grounded and real issues, fly off into scenes of the avant-garde and the magical as Nebel either hallucinates or suffers flashbacks. Complimenting this is the fact the film appears to have been re-rendered as a three-quarter animation, the likes of which you will have seen in something like "Sin City".

Nebel is a guard at a train station in the Czech countryside which serves the town of Bily Potok, near what must be the Polish border. He sits in his office; puts milk out for a cat which comes and visits and generally makes sure the set-up runs efficiently with his co-worker, who has a father who knew Alois' father, such is the intimacy of the surroundings. Having lived in the area his whole life, and being a certain age, he is able to remember when, during the German occupation during the war, the station was used as a stop-over to transport Czech Jews to the concentration camps. His bland orating of the various station names along the line that he operates might just as well be the names of the victims of those camps, the film appearing to deliberately track over a graveyard the first time he does this.

Meanwhile, on the other side of said border, a younger man appears to be making a break from Soviet soldiers, whom we recognise as shouting 'Stoy' because we're all able to distinguish Russian from Czech, aren't we? Ambling across, he turns up at Nebel's little platform and, for whatever reason, possesses a photograph from years prior depicting both station guards' fathers standing together on this very platform. The burning question at the core of "Alois Nebel" is as to why he has this picture and why would he risk such bad news in crossing over into Czech territory when there is not, if we all know our Communist societies, a tremendous deal to gain?

The film is, therefore, a mystery story, but it is not a mystery story its lead character attempts to solve. Indeed, Nebel could not be further away from where he should be and, if anything, it solves itself in the background with Nebel happening to be around when it happens. A lesser film might have told the film from the perspective of this border-jumper, who has to go through being caught; beaten up; imprisoned and must, ultimately, look for a certain individual for certain reasons connected to the past - a past which overlaps with this stranger's.

"Alois Nebel" is more preoccupied with the travails of its eponymous hero, who is whisked off to the big city after he attempts some treatment on his would-be depression; seeing, for himself, just how bad, I think, life can be for men in his position when things go really wrong. The film is ridden with interesting subtexts and juxtapositions - there is a heavy emphasis on trains and the railway industry more broadly, which is at once both a source of and reason for: employment; unemployment; despair; fear; life; history; panic and national character. As a new decade blooms, people whose lives are essentially over seem to celebrate, despite the fact their society is heading into a wider unknown.

Tantalisingly, the film cannot settle on what it perceives as a good ending or a bad one: what will come of the railways once capitalist reform takes place? Is bloody revenge justified within the context of the back-story which reveals itself, furthermore if the authorities can hardly be trusted? Is all you need in life, ultimately, another human to love? This will have the film sound more philosophical than it is, but as far as 80's set semi-animated Czech films go, "Alois Nebel" is worth checking out.

This is characteristically Czech, that worldview shaped by centuries of being tossed from the sphere of one empire to the other and being unable to do more than watch; this watching is usually a whimsy or a mute sadness in Czech films. From this view flows a disenchantment with power as well as morals and narrative, a disenchantment that powers a lot of the life of representation over there, from independent- minded cinema right down to porn.

Painting instead of chronicle. The film is actually both, the chronicle a series of moods about detachment from the world, centered on a weary station master in a remote post in the mountains who can only watch as night rolls down on the passing of things. There's smuggling going on to and from the border, this is how the activities of men are rendered here, as superficial schemes of an uninteresting importance. He is soon fired, takes his watching down to the city where no one cares. The backdrop is the fall of communism around the Bloc but this too reaches us as faint echoes from a TV or radio, there's no motivation for political discourse in any of this, only distance and disenchantment.

This is the treatise, about this man who can wander away from it all as passively as he sat and watched the machinations and how this nearly costs him the one prospect left for love. It's not terribly interesting, the detachment as weariness more than space for reflection.

The sketch is a bit more so, that's where the film derives a lot of its power from. It's an animated film, though it seems real people and locations were used for their nuance as the backdrop to sketch over. The animation is basically a shorthand here that lets the makers accentuate moods with a softer distance that you really have to strive to create with the camera. It worked for me, the dark mountains, the mud, the thankless vodka around a table with strangers, it seeps into the bones with the rain and chills.

When I think of animation, I think of motion but A.N. prefers to allow stillness to tell most of its story. That moribundity is a stand-in for despair and Kafkaesque government oppression. The upward emphasis here is light and dark and their constant interplay, both literally and as metaphor. Men are dwarfed to insignificance by uncaring worlds of incandescence and shadow. Hardly an easy watch, but worth your time.

I saw an announcement for this movie which included a screenshot: I barely read the synopsis and went, and I'm very glad I did! The black and white images, gradually including shades of grey, are beautiful and captivating, though of course haunting given the movie's theme. It's a story of loneliness, old crimes, and ethnic hatreds fueled by WWII. Worth watching also to learn something about the fate of that part of Europe. I'm not sure whether someone already mentioned this, but I think it would be nice for viewers to know that Nebel = fog in German.