Marketa Lazarova Reviews

Cinema For The Ages

Marketa Lazarova is one of those legendary films that has long been unavailable for home viewing...until now. A fantastic example of 'pure cinema' the like of which the Eastern Europeans only know how to accomplish, this Second Run DVD is stunningly presented in a great print with crystal clear image and sound.

The obvious touchstone is 'Andrei Rublev', but perhaps because of their shared Medieval backdrop. Marketa instead chooses not to dwell on the characters' theses on human evil and instead creates a welter of astonishing images, the like of which is pretty much unmatched in terms of quality and inventiveness in cinema. The story is by the by, instead resolving into an often jaw-dropping succession of scenes involving pre-Steadicam free-roaming camera, psychedlic images and an genre-defying amalgamation of musics and sounds, including bells, whistles, choral chanting and soaring female solo singing. Put simply, Marketa Lazarova is a film which makes the often hackneyed tradition of commercial Western cinema seem dull.

Confusing and weird

Although this film is clearly rated by many critics, I simply found it too confusing and weird to enjoy.

Stuck with it for about an hour, then gave up. I found it very difficult to work out who was who, what was going on, etc, not helped by occasional bits about pagan rituals slotted in at random.

I was expecting to like it, as I am keen on foreign language art house movies, but this was a step too far for me. Clearly, the film has its fans, but I am not one of them.

[Highly rated reviewer]

It's very good - but beware too much hype

Firstly, I'll start by saying that I found this film astonishing on an aesthetic level. The imagery is astonishing, and as another reviewer has noted, the sound design and score are revolutionary (something that was so often a feature of European cinema since the mid-fifties, with the ascension of avant-garde classical music across the continent). It is also well acted, stunningly realised and kinetically edited. It is well worth three hours of your time.

But....

There seems to be a tendency at the moment to reclaim lost masterworks of world cinema, and to compare them to the Canon - to The Seventh Seal, to Andrei Rublev or Stalker, to Forman or Polanski or Kurosawa. This shows a real enthusiasm for this kind of cinema, certainly. But I don't think it's very instructive. The great weakness about this film is that its narrative is relatively weak, and the characters undeveloped. Hence the other reviews here - one saying the story is not the important element of the film (but as a work of narrative cinema, surely it is still important?), the other that a loss of interest occurred after about an hour.

It is true that Marketa Lazarova often utilises narrative ellipses as an interesting device - a scene occurs, and you lose any sense of what it has in fact shown you, until it is re-examined in a later chapter which sheds light on to its actual meaning, and lets the viewer restructure events once again into their chronological order. Thus it can become confusing, only to become clearer twenty minutes on. I found this a remarkable device in one particular scene.

Yet no matter how much powerful allegorical or symbolic imagery its director skillfully conjures up, its still embellishing a fairly routine narrative. And yes, it can be linked to Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, Sergio Leone's bombastic aesthetics (both image and sound), and Ingmar Bergman (at his most austere), but the weakness of the narrative lets it down a little, and the lack of any real substance (save for a muddled treatise on Paganism vs Christianity) becomes really apparent after two hours or so...

It's highly watchable European cinema. But at times I did feel like I was watching a more pretty version of Robin Hood or The Vikings. No great themes are really tackled here - and that was surely the most important element of the best of fifties and sixties European film-making. Nit-picking, I know. And it's difficult to know how much the sub-titling lets it down, as often there is clearly dialogue that is not being translated. But I expected a lot, and this work, voted the best Czech film of all time, didn't quite deliver.

[Highly rated reviewer]

impenetratable art house

At over 21/2 hours long with barely a plot, this film makes very hard going. The film is full of pagan and christian symbolism which means something, but without an engaging plot, it hardly encourages the watcher to stick with it.

I watched the first hour, and then watched the film on fast forward with subtitles.

Probably for film and media students, but not for anyone else.

Too much for me

I blame my mood rather than the film. I found all the mud, poverty and sheer badness just too much for me in the early stages of this long film and stopped watching it. That was maybe a mistake on my part.

Marketa lazarova

Even if i enjoyed films of relentless violence, which i don't, i still think this film is not only disjointed, and confused, but it has only one pace, a slow relentless sequence of torture and repetative violence, without much purpose to it that i could make out other than to illustrate in epic detail the brutality of the time, which after the first few minutes i got the point thank you, the rest of it i felt had to be tolerated and i ended up fast forwarding through a lot of it.

I think this film could have benifitted from some brutal violent editing, at both the script stage and on the cutting room floor.

Forgotten for a reason

A real curio of European cinema and hailed as the best Czech film of all time, Marketa Lazarova is a mix-bag of joys for even fans of world and art-house cinema. Made just prior to the Prague Spring of 1968, but set in the austere confines of the 12th century, the film has much to recommend it as a pure cinematic experience. Sweeping set-piece cinematography, beautiful black & white imagery and a beguiling soundtrack make it a treat for the senses. Less enthralling are its three-hour length and a fractured narrative based round a fairly simple tale of love across the divide of two opposing Medieval factions; a story that has echoes of Romeo and Juliet, or perhaps more tellingly given its central European setting, the Polish epic poem, Pan Tadeusz.

The harshness of the times are captured in detail, perhaps a testament to director Frantisek Vlacil, who made his cast and crew live a Spartan existence during the two years it took to make the film. The conflict between the rival clans, the Kozlíks and the Lazars, is shown not as a fight between good and bad, more as a base squabble between rivals for limited resources. Against this background grows the, fairly thinly drawn, love story between Mikoláš Kozlík and Markéta Lazarová.

Overall – Marketa Lazarova is beautiful to look at and has some haunting images and music. But the underlying themes of Paganism’s clash with the oncoming Christianity and the relationship between Germany and Czechoslovakia aren’t enough to help a flimsy plot through three whole hours. Marketa Lazarova might be hailed by some as a hidden gem of European cinema, but for me it’s a film that’s been largely forgotten for a reason.

A Long Runner

Credit: I like a good medieval saga like the next person, so this film worked in terms of atmosphere and historical detail. The acting was appropriately brooding and portentous. The cinematography rather beautiful, capturing the wintry wastes, and haunting forests etc... Debit: too long. Not edited enough. There was generally too much film without purpose. Slow can easily become turgid. This is not helped by a rather confusing plot, which is probably very simple at heart, but seemed to have too much repetitive back and forth. Overall: shame it wasn't edited more, as with a few less troughs, and more christian versus pagan stuff, could have been a total classic.