I will agree that Prague Nights at first felt like the weakest Deaf Crocodile title I'd seen when I watched a couple months back. However, after a recent rewatch in the wider scope of Jiri Brdecka's filmography, it does make a tad more sense.therewillbeblus wrote: ↑Fri Jul 14, 2023 5:22 pmOof I thought this was an extremely dull portmanteau exercise in 'cautionary tale' horror, where none of the segments felt interesting or went anywhere unexpected. The best was the second, purely because there are some impressively dizzying visual flourishes during the dancing crescendo at the end, but they all kind of end the same way, and aren't involving at all on the road to get there. It looks like there are some worthy supplements that should assist in appreciating the context, but I can't imagine doling out more time to this thing
Going through his works has led me to realize Brdecka is a filmmaker who first and foremost is one obsessed with bringing fairytales to life, from his early animations all the way to his final screenplay for The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians but Prague Nights definitely seems like an oddity in this sense. Where something like Lemonade Joe or The Cassandra Cat are light, comedic, and colorful, Prague Nights is dark, mostly serious, and painted with murky browns and blacks, with even the tinted sections feeling more removed of color than Lemonade Joe. Prague Nights also definitely seems to move at a slower pace than his other films and the general vibe is more reliant on atmosphere than anything else. But while Prague Nights lacks the zest of a typical Brdecka, it's still a tale befitting of Brdecka.
The main center of this idea comes at the framing device of modern Prague, of a businessman lusting after a gorgeous woman who'd rather tell stories than sleep with him, it's a dryly comedic little setup but what I want to bring is how it opens, Milos Kopecky (the businessman) leaving a business meeting before saying that he'll be busy with studying a contract before spending the night futilely trying to find someone to sleep with and here is where the Brdecka style comes into play, with him showing that key figures of authority are really no more than lustful sinners and through this setup we're given the general idea of what Brdecka wants to do, to demonstrate the goodness of old Prague and it's values through this anthology hook where the audience intimately develops a loathing for the modern businessman of the modern system of the picture and in turn, is more willing to be drawn into the more traditional stories of the film. Indeed this is the reason why Brdecka most likely chose to shot the modern setting in tinted Black and White while shooting the sequences set in the past, in color.
But onto the actual stories and the same idea of the initial framing device is kept the same, in each a powerful, lustful, and sadistic young person is ultimately put in their place by an older gentlemen or a person representing old ideas, before the surprise twist happens. Is it mundane and uninteresting for something that's supposed to be an anthology, yes indeed but here's the thing though, Brdecka isn't interested in a story but rather in the setting. IIRC, in the booklet, Brdecka's daughter mentions that Brdecka made this project out to be a sort of ad for Old Prague or something of that nature and it's clear that's what interested Brdecka, even the credits show this with shots of Prague architecture. But the main thing that interested Brdecka was mostly it's classic stories, which as mentioned were of huge interest to Brdecka, specifically it's folktales and, most likely, the feelings they evoked from him. Each story follows a simple folktale structure, figures like the Golem and the Devil himself appear, the twists could be mistaken for genuine folktale twists, and the final story is told like a typical folktale. The strength of Prague Nights ultimately is in it's ability give of the vibe of a folktale in it's atmosphere, it's silence, it's mood, and ultimately, it's stillness. And when it moves and bursts into true Brdeckan energy, it catches you off guard in the best way possible. At least that's why I like Prague Nights and it's ultimately a shame that it was a bit of a troubled production for Brdecka because I do wish he did more horror with this and his short, There Was a Miller on a River (featured on this disc), proving that he is capable of directing more serious films.
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