Rating: C-
Dir: Václav Vorlícek
Star: Petra Cernocká, Jan Hrušínský, Vladimír Mensík, Jana Drbohlavová
a.k.a. Dívka na kosteti
Maybe if I was eleven, I would have vibed with this more. Or perhaps, eight. Yet this seemed to have far broader appeal, reportedly being one of the ten biggest Czech films of the entire decade at the local box-office. Damn. I can only conclude Czechoslovakia was hard-up for entertainment in the days of Soviet control, and was grateful for anything that moved. To be fair, this at least contains no significant political or social moralizing, so may have come across as escapist fun to the local population. However, once I got past the fun to be found in seeing people turned into animals – something which takes less than the 75-minute running time – I found little here to amuse.
It begins looking like a Harry Potter ancestor. Saxana (Cernocká, from the Olivia Newton-John school of “teenagers”) is a witch in training, having trouble fitting in and finding her studies boring. Talking to the school janitor (Mensik), a retired vampire, she learns of and uses a spell to transport her to the muggle everyday world for 44 hours, where she’s befriended by classmate there, Honza Bláha (Hrušínský). The janitor is sent after Saxana to make sure she’s safe, but the abuse of her magical talents – limited though they largely are to the transformations mentioned above – get her into a series of scrapes. Though naturally, it all ends happily, with a more permanent arrangement being reached.
The lack of imagination on view is kinda impressive, though to be fair, the budget here clearly isn’t huge. With all the magic trickery potentially at Saxana’s disposal, the fact we are mostly stuck with things like teachers being turned into rabbits is underwhelming. There is a bit where Honza literally loses his head, while Saxana is confined in the local loony bin (top), and ends up temporarily replacing it with a bust of Napoleon. That’s the kind of imagination for which I was left pining. Slapping unconvincing donkey ears on the trio of school bullies, and giving her teacher (Drbohlavová) buck teeth? Considerably less impressive, and it feels like the kind of thing J.K. Rowling could have knocked off in a chapter. Then likely thought better of it.
Cernocká makes for an acceptable heroine, though I found her hair rather distracting. She also sings the theme song, a catchy little number, which could well have been the Czech entry for the 1972 Eurovision Song Contest, if they had been taking part in those days. Indeed, most of the performances are decent enough: a little on the broad side, yet given the fantastic nature of the story, not excessively so. The people here seem surprisingly unfazed by the strange occurrences which Saxana leaves behind her. Mind you, they were living in the magical and equally unrealistic world of Communism, so that tracks. This isn’t a bad film. It’s just one which squanders its premise, and ends up being little more than a sub-optimal episode of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.