Beauty In Trouble: About Sex, Money And A Good Man Movie Review

By Prairie Miller

While life just got a little more complicated with the introduction of the market economy into the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and Chine too, so did their movies. So now the human equation counting the psychological, emotional and sexual aspects of romantic relationships has more recently experienced the addition of dollar sign considerations. Which according to the playful but often grim Czech social satire Beauty In Trouble: About Sex, Money And A Good Man, may as a result entail the unpredictable subtraction of any of the others enumerated.

Ana Geislerova is Marcela, the beauty in trouble of the film's title. She's an attractive, far too young mother of a teenage daughter and grade school son whose home is in shambles following the disastrous 2002 Prague floods, much like the Hurricane Katrina New Orleans tragedy. With the economic collapse of the region, Marcela's husband Jarda (Roman Luknar) is jobless, and has taken to operating a stolen car ring and chop shop out of the family garage.

When Jarda is arrested, Marcela contemplates a divorce and takes her children to live in her mother's cramped apartment, despite the presence of her vulgar, detestable stepfather (Jiri Schmitzer) with pedophiliac tendencies. But in an odd twist of fate, Marcela encounters Evzen (Josef Abrham) while on a visit to the prison, a wealthy elderly man responsible for Jarda's arrest, as his most recent car theft victim.

With her own life in utter disarray and despite her inability to resist the consuming sexual spell her workingclass spouse has cast over her, Marcela relents to the persistent advances of the kindhearted Evzen. And even though Evzen's indiscriminate generosity extends to having her repulsive and potentially dangerous, lewd stepfather join the reconfigured family to live at his sumptuous villa in Italy, following the death of Marcela's mother.

Director Jan Hrebejk (Divided We Fall) concludes his pessimistic tale on an appropriately unresolved note, with an ironic surface appearance of a happy ending in an affluent capitalist paradise, but with clear intimations of disaster down the road as materialist considerations preempt matters of the heart. And while Marcela's vile stepfather mulls his perverse cravings, she's still sexually obsessed and craving the hunk hubby she left behind. A meditation on money and its impact on human emotions. Do the math.

Menemsha Films
Unrated
2 stars

judythpiazza@newsblaze.com

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