The Weight of War on a Marriage in Protektor

Details

Protektor
Directed by Marek Najbrt
Film Movement
Opens August 5, Lincoln Plaza and Brooklyn Heights Cinema

Related Content

• Literary Lushes: Our 10 Favorite Book (and Play)-Writing Boozers
  January 20, 2012
• Vaclav Havel, 1936-2011
  December 14, 2011
• John Malkovich Robbed In Prague
  June 4, 2011
• GREAT SCOTT!
  March 14, 2012
• Food Trucks Get Their Own Book; Mickey D's CEO Defends Ronald McDonald
  May 20, 2011

More About

• Prague
• Marek Najbrt
• Marek Daniel
• Jana Plodkova
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

The story of a marriage's fracture under the weight of Germany's WWII occupation of Czechoslovakia, Protektor is a wartime melodrama with panache to spare, literally. Director Marek Najbrt divides the plight of Prague radio personality Emil Vrbata (Marek Daniel, who resembles a slightly puffier F. Scott Fitzgerald) and his actress wife, Hana (Jana Plodková), with interstitials of the lead characters doing some furious but obviously fake bicycle riding to a thrumming noir score. It's the most obvious of the film's leaps into heavy stylization, a choice that becomes more peculiar as the inevitable closes in. Emil has vowed to protect his Jewish wife, who wears a platinum wig to transform herself into both a movie star and a shiksa, and pledges docility in turn to Prague's German "Deputy Protector." It's not all bad: Emil becomes popular with the Germans and flirts with his pretty new fans as Hana, exposed as a Jew, flirts with her old identity. Contempt takes hold between the two as Emil loses sight of the greater moral good in favor of his singular commitment to Hana. Najbrt gets the look and feel of noir fatalism down, but storytelling that alternates between roughshod and lethargic means the film doesn't hold together as much more than pretty fragments.