Kolya

This film from the Czech Republic is bursting with the emotion Saul Bellow calls “potato love”: a banal yet irresistible flood of primal human feeling that bypasses the censoring intellect and goes straight to the soul. The plot lacks even a drop of originality – cynical middle-aged bachelor grudgingly assumes custody of cute kid with resulting expansion of his emotional horizons. Yet a warm ocean of pleasure awaits those who believe the heart of a story is the conviction with which it’s told. Protagonist Frantisek Louka (Zdenek Sverak, who also wrote the script) is a cranky, sex-obsessed concert cellist whose wiseass personality has gotten him booted from the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. Louka’s now plentiful free time is mainly spent mattress-rodeoing with married women and trying to scrounge enough funeral musician gigs to buy a crummy used car. Desperate for cash, he participates in a scam through which he’s paid to marry a young Russian-born woman who needs Czech papers to avoid deportation. But when she skips town to join her boyfriend in France, Louka is left in charge of his “stepson” — five-year-old Kolya (Chalimon). After a period of deep denial, the mortified Louka gradually starts bonding with the tyke, finding unexpected focus and satisfaction in the fatherly rituals of meals, bathing, teaching new words, and explaining away childhood fears. He even draws his astonished mistresses into a makeshift maternal consultancy network, enlarging himself in their esteem even as their sexual relationships fall by the wayside. The tale’s resolution, at once heart-warming and -breaking, is undiminished in power by its inevitability. Young Chalimon, one of those rare child actors who seems to effortlessly tap some enchanted spring of performing genius, is a marvel, conveying all the innocence, nascent cunning, and terrifying vulnerability of childhood. His ability to instinctively grasp and define his character’s function is as powerful a testament as any to the DNA-deep emotional honesty of the story. Director Jan Sverak (Zdenek’s son) works closely with director of photography Vladimir Smutny to place Louka and Kolya inside a sumptuous visual world of rich reds, umbers, and whites and images of centuries-old religious art that symbolically enhance the tale’s latent spirituality. The thematic background of the 1989 Velvet Revolution corresponds to the liberation of Louka’s soul. Lest this all sound a bit heavy, it should also be noted that Kolya is a funny, sexy, irony-rich film that lavishly bestows that rarest gift of Eastern European cinema: fun. A star-making performance by the droll, owlish elder Sverak and a fine cast that works together like a single-minded organism add further strength to a movie that fully deserves its Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film. Originality, it would seem, is one of the more overrated dramatic virtues.