Director:
Jonáš KarásekCámara:
Tomáš JuríčekMúsica:
Matúš ŠirokýReparto:
Marek Majeský, Monika Hilmerová, Michal Kubovčík, Michal Dlouhý, Pavel Slabý, Ján Jackuliak, Roman Luknár, Pavel Nový, Alice Bendová, Lukáš Pelč (más)Sinopsis(1)
Candidate - is a fiction movie about the background of one presidential election campaign. It is a real story, that never happened. (texto oficial de la distribuidora)
Reseñas (6)
It’s not that it’s free of pure WTF moments, supported by powerful, completely non-conceptual Czech post-synchrony (the etudes of Bishop Joseph feel like passages from Vatican porn). But if you are waiting for a naive tabloid sump like Catch a Billionaire / Kajínek, you will be disappointed, because this film was made by a) people who obviously have experience with the marketing and advertising environment, b) people who can write a solid dialogue here and there, c) people who can more or less make movies (I'm not saying that they do a good job at it). Formally, of course, we are talking about a very hard-working derivative on the border between cappuccino advertising and an imitation of Tony Scott. In terms of the screenplay, these are two very laboriously patchworked storylines, one of which feels more like a factory for humor and the promo for the voice and face of Michal Dlouhý, the other like a forced construction of a political thriller in realities that do not do it any good. It is an amorphous conglomeration of motifs that are individually interesting, sometimes even having certain critical potential, but together they seem like rash chatter about the essence of contemporary political marketing, and so on. When you decipher the individual layers and filter out the nonsense, you are left with a trivial story with a very trivial message. Candidate tries to pretend that there is something more to it, but it is best captured by the "nonsense" of the following SPOILER connection: the Slovak Kennedy and a descendant of Štúr. The film simply behaves similarly to the main character - it does everything with effect, and where the effect doesn't help, it takes on even more effect. The characters often give the impression that they don't actually react to the world around them and move on simply because the script requires them to (it is as if Coppola’s The Conversation completely gave up the main character's mental suffering and focused only on the content of the wiretaps). As a result, the superficiality has no critical / ironic corrective. I never once felt that Candidate was insulting my intelligence, but I also never felt that the film was stimulating it in any way. The most positive thing I can say about the film is that in the given genre, there’s probably nothing better that has been created in Czechoslovakia. And that's really too little.
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Sátira sorprendentemente bastante bien hecha. Formalmente hecha con mucha atención (excepto el sonido) pero no como objetivo propio: su concepto visual de edición y filtro va de la mano con la efectividad superficial del mundo publicitario en el que se desarrolla. Con el humor solo ocasional, pero acertadamente entrelazado. Por primera vez en la película, se pronuncian chistes checo-eslovacos, y ya era la hora (la escena del MacDonald’s es la mejor), pero de manera tan elegante que se van reír tanto los eslovacos y como los checos. El personaje principal es carismático y creíble, Marek Majeský fue una buena elección. Candidate es una película muy eslovaca, pero no en el sentido negativo de la palabra. Refleja como se esconde la ausencia del ingenio detrás del glamur de los «valores», las compras y la discutibilidad política del país. No le doy la cuarta estrella, porque no estoy seguro de hasta qué punto lo hace conscientemente. Esta duda me queda también por el remate final supuestamente sorprendente, que se ve muy artificial, para que el espectador tenga la necesidad de debatir con los cineastas sobre cómo en realidad terminó.
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I have a feeling that the Slovak cinematography has been improving in the last two years. And as is often the case, the Czechs are involved, even though they didn’t show off much with their own movies this year. Anyhow, hats off to the Slovaks. Candidate is such an apt satire of today’s politics that it made me nauseous.
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A technically sophisticated film from the alternative reality of the Slovak presidential election. However, none of it is seen through to the end. Yet the atmosphere is engaging, the visual ideas are not odd, and some of the performances are remarkable, especially among the female cast. Monika Hilmerová reigns as the grey eminence of the biggest schemers and has never looked so mature and so great. If you're interested in believable espionage in Slovak scenery with a bit of Czech pessimism, go for it.
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I'm in a meeting and thus had a review ready in my head that will hate the film in spite of lobbing it a four-star rating and a joyous review, as opposed to just giving it three stars. If Candidate appealed to me on principle, I can counter any attack with "yes, I'm fine with the pointless visual opulence, the out-of-focus characters leaving the scene in extreme slow motion, the unnecessary camera tilts, and the infantile refocusing from macro to long without any narrative anchor" (a.k.a. that's what’s getting shot for us now that we've taken the spoils from RED, right). But so what, if no one else can do this in the post-Czechoslovakia (props to the exceptions), what am I supposed to do? Karásek's debut is a commercial drenched not only in story, but above all in stylization, which is revoltingly clean, squelching through simple shapes, designer interiors, perfectly composed shots, and the power of gesture versus the power of words. So it actually sucks that it had to waste its time with such a local, uninventive, and overwrought plot, piled with characters I cared more about even less than any future presidential election. Especially in Slovakia. Not to mention the monstrous (Slovakian) postsynchronization: whenever the form manages to detach you from that malignant provinciality, it always drags you brutally back down to earth. And kicks you in the head.
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I wasn't expecting this. The Czech-Slovak relatively independent film surprisingly presents a very well-developed story that works and which you quite believe in, even though it is relatively minimalist and focused only on a few characters, despite being about the choice of president. This is the kind of stuff that should get wider distribution and into movie theaters, not just on TV where it gets forgotten.
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