Our reviewers select and review the best independent and foreign films on amazon.com, cd universe, and netflix

King of Thieves (Czech Republic 2004, 101 min, dir: Ivan Fila. cast: Lazar Ristovski, Yasha Kultiasov, Oktay Ozdemir, Katharina Thalbach, Julia Khanverdieva)

Mixing romanticism and misery was always been a specialty of Eastern Europe. The excuse was grimness enforced by Communism. The Communists are long gone but the filmmaking conventions persist.

Jan Sverak, who directed Koyla, is a leading proponent. Ivan Fila, who directed King of Thieves and Lea before, is an eager student. Both films are about children who undergo traumatic experiences as they experience the injustices of the world.

Barbu (Yasha Kultiasov) and his older sister Mimma (Julia Khanverdieva), children of a Ukrainian peasant, are sold to a traveling circus promoter for a better life in Berlin. The girl is forced into prostitution and the boy is trained to be a pickpocket. Caruso (Lazar Ristovski) is the ringmaster overseeing it all.

He’s a mixture of charm, magic, and brutality that is counterbalanced by his drug-addicted girlfriend Julie (Katharina Thalbach) and Marcel (Oktay Ozdemir), the boy who befriends Barbu and tutors him in the art of thievery.

What keeps this pudding together is Caruso’s swings form demonic to delightful. One moment he is whipping the boys and threatening them if they don’t go out and get more money. The next he is doing magic tricks and taking Barbu to the circus.

The photography is by Vladimir Smutny, a seasoned pro with colored gels. He’s from the paint with light school of Eastern Europeans who are time-warp practitioners; throwbacks to when Hollywood cinematographers also believed that a shadow was something without value unless you bathed it in color. The effect heightens the romantic feeling of a film whose plot is pretty grim.

But the combination of grimness and romanticism is the reason King of Thieves stands out and is worth a look. The other curious reason to have a look is the production shut down in the middle for lack of money. It was re-started two years later. Two years is a long time for two rapidly growing kids. Interesting to watch Barbu and Mimma as they take a jump in size and maturity not entirely due to their new professions as a whore and a thief.

The Country Teacher (Czech Republic 2008, 103 min, dir: Bohdan Slama, cast: Pavel Liska, Zuzana Bydzovska, Ladislav Sedivy)

Sex hangs heavily in the air like the scent of new cut grass. The woman farmer in The Country Teacher is neither young nor beautiful: but manages to charge every scene with her sensuality. A pretty amazing feat in jeans and a woolen shirt.

MovieWithMe.com also reviewed The Girl From Paris, which could be a companion piece to The Country Teacher. The first is French, the second Czech: both are detailed glimpses of actual life on a farm, and the blunt, rough characters that inhabit this environment. But The Girl from Paris is looking for a guy, while The Country Teacher is a gay refugee from the city looking for a place to recover from his broken relationship.

He finds room and board at a farmhouse near the school with a woman farmer and her teenage son. She wants romance, he wants her son. It could be the log line for a Hollywood remake. What saves the film from a one-line fate is the subtle sketching of the characters, all struggling under intense emotional needs.

The woman farmer maintains an incredible sensuality despite her daily routine of hay harvesting or cow herding. Her son’s brute courtship of his girlfriend is the only way he knows; even though she resists at every turn yearning for more civility. When she goes to college in the city he follows her, finding himself more out of place than ever. She rejects him and sends him home.

Back at the farm, the lad’s schoolteacher tries to seduce him. The intent is not so much to have the boy as to find some tenderness to fill his loneliness. The boy rejects him, and the result is the teacher’s exile. What is so wonderful about this film is its amazing slice-of-life quality creating empathy for a mother, a son, and a teacher: all of who cross each other’s lives, all of whom frustrate the other’s love, and all of whom we deeply feel deserve happiness.

Zelary (Czech Republic 2003, 148 min, dir: Ondrej Trojan, cast: Ana Geislerova, Gyorgy Csehaimi)

Do all of us want to walk through an unmarked door into a secret life better than the one we thought we wanted? Eliska/Hana has two names in Zelary because she has two lives. One is as the big city hospital nurse who assists her surgeon boyfriend in saving the life of a rough country peasant by giving him a transfusion of her own blood.

That is before the Gestapo gets wise to the hospital staff’s resistance activities. Suddenly, that night, she must flee. It has all been arranged. She will accompany the peasant laborer she helped save back to his mountain village. There she will pose as his wife until the war is over.

The best war movies are about uprooted people and the generous acts by strangers who preserve the flame of life and compassion. The best of these stories must sometimes age with the storytellers. Kveta Lagatova didn’t think of writing a book until she was in her 80s. Then she took out a story she had written thirty or forty years before, based on what she had heard when she was a schoolteacher in the isolated mountain region were Joza (Janda) takes his new bride, Hana (known as Eliska before she went into hiding).

“The characters there (in the mountains) have very sharp contours, that which elsewhere is not so well-defined” commented Kveta. Her book, Jozova Hanule, became a best seller in the Czech Republic and the basis of Zelary. Like Hana in the movie, Kveta witnessed a culture that hadn’t change is a century, and would soon disappear with the rush to modernity.

Zelray is a love story, large and romantic, about the most unlikely lovers in a place far removed from history. Yet it makes its own history. The tragedy of the ending, and Hana/Eliska’s return, reminds me of the ending of Akira Kurosawa‘s Dersu Uzala. Both films confront their protagonists with the loss of something wild and free not only in the wilderness, but also in themselves. They know it can never be replaced. They mourn for themselves.

Their tragedy is ours too, because we’ve all joined a more civilized world. It is even more perplexing to us because our choice was also for survival: of a kind just as necessary as in the forests and mountains. Hana can never go back, and she knows it. Could Kveta Lagatova have written this book as a young woman? Kurosawa was in his sixties when he directed Dersu.

Perhaps only a lifetime lived through the 20^th Century could connect the brutality of the Nazis-feared as the destroyers of civilization; to the destruction of nature and traditional life actually caused by civilization. These two films are my idea of an amazing double feature.