This is great. Never heard of this movie but will be watching it at some point after reading this. I know this is a facile comparison, connecting this movie to another one set in communist Eastern Europe, but your comments reminded me of "The Delegation," which is an Albanian movie made in 2018 but set in 1990. It has the same sort of mythic, eternal quality that you describe: whether you know anything about Albania or not, it doesn't really matter, because the deeper story is about human relationships. The movie tells the story of a political prisoner who is transported from prison so that he can meet a European delegate, who happens to be his old friend, in order to make Albania seem like a progressing nation, rather than the paranoid police state that it had become. The car transporting the prisoner breaks down in the mountains and the group in the car--the prisoner, the driver, and two party officials of different ranks--are put into a situation in which their social positions become increasingly irrelevant. It's streaming for free on Tubi, I think.
Sounds great. Also sounds, like The Party and the Guests, like a play. Nemec said in an interview how his screenplay had a unity of time & place that was missing from Krumbachova's story (which had other scenes at a train station and so on). This quality I suspect both heightens and undercuts the allegorical nature. You're left observing how humans behave to one another.
This is great. Never heard of this movie but will be watching it at some point after reading this. I know this is a facile comparison, connecting this movie to another one set in communist Eastern Europe, but your comments reminded me of "The Delegation," which is an Albanian movie made in 2018 but set in 1990. It has the same sort of mythic, eternal quality that you describe: whether you know anything about Albania or not, it doesn't really matter, because the deeper story is about human relationships. The movie tells the story of a political prisoner who is transported from prison so that he can meet a European delegate, who happens to be his old friend, in order to make Albania seem like a progressing nation, rather than the paranoid police state that it had become. The car transporting the prisoner breaks down in the mountains and the group in the car--the prisoner, the driver, and two party officials of different ranks--are put into a situation in which their social positions become increasingly irrelevant. It's streaming for free on Tubi, I think.
Sounds great. Also sounds, like The Party and the Guests, like a play. Nemec said in an interview how his screenplay had a unity of time & place that was missing from Krumbachova's story (which had other scenes at a train station and so on). This quality I suspect both heightens and undercuts the allegorical nature. You're left observing how humans behave to one another.