A lacquered Czech period piece with surprisingly topical interests at its core, “We Have Never Been Modern” rather ambitiously borrows its title from a key text by the late French philosopher Bruno Latour — in which he argued that humanity’s distinction between nature and our own culture is a wholly modern development, and one we’d do best to move away from. While Latour’s ideas can indeed be mapped onto a story that charts modern society’s fixation on human advancement against its rejection of human difference, Matěj Chlupáček’s gripping, gleamingly produced second feature isn’t as academic as all that: Ultimately a humane message movie planting flags for both women’s liberation and queer rights, this Karlovy Vary competition premiere could easily resonate with festival and arthouse audiences away from home turf.
Following extensive work in TV, shorts and music videos, Chlupáček’s return to the big screen arrives a decade after his precocious debut feature “Touchless,” which unspooled in Karlovy Vary when he was a mere teenager. A youthful brashness remains in “We Have Never Been Modern,” even aside from the sensitive, once-taboo subject matter of Miro Šifra’s script: Arrestingly off-kilter compositions, seasick handheld camera moves and stylized multimedia flourishes signal the film’s intent to break from the staid behavior of much Czech-Slovak heritage cinema, just as its protagonist Helena (leading Czech star Eliska Krenková, from “Winter Flies” and “Borders of Love”) increasingly chafes against the patriarchal, capitalistic norms of 1930s Czechoslovakia.
The year is 1937, in fact, just before German occupation would shatter the glistening industrialized surfaces of the new democratic republic. The encroaching shadow of fascism is felt in various characters’ deference to vehently anti-Communist, Hitler-excusing authorities, though nobody’s looking too far into the future while the gilded wheels of progress are turning in the present. The spanking-new factory town of Svit is an exemplary symbol of this economy-first thinking, built as it is around a vast viscose plant headed up by young, Brylcreem-slicked director Alois (Miloslav König). He is married to Helena, a bright, questioning firebrand type who has nonetheless abandoned her medical school studies to move to Svit and start a family. With their first child due imminently — onscreen titles count down to her expected delivery date with a jittery air of foreboding — they are the very picture of new Czech success.
So it really doesn’t fit that picture when the corpse of a stillborn baby is found in the rubble at Alois’ factory; that the body has both male and female genitalia is a hushed-up detail that sets off feverish rumor-mongering in a small, conservative community. Eager to draw a veil over the discovery as swiftly as possible, Alois complies absolutely when secret police agents (Milan Ondrik and Marián Mitaš) arrive to investigate, even inviting them to stay at his and Helena’s home. Their hasty official conclusion, pinning the blame on alleged Communist disruptors, doesn’t wash with a skeptical Helena, who begins to do some digging of her own — and is eventually led to frightened, naïve factory employee Alexander (Richard Langdon), who identifies as male but has female reproductive organs.
The truth behind the tragedy unfolds against a culture of uncomprehending silence on intersex and LGBT identity, with societal gaps in knowledge filled by lurid assumptions and accusations. With her own marriage at stake in a burgeoning culture war, Helena must leading a largely unsupported fight for tolerance and enlightenment in a community where “what is traditional doesn’t need changing” is an oft-repeated mantra. (Šifra’s dialogue can go a little heavy on the rhetorical ironies.) Granted a few moments of stand-up-and-cheer verbal rebellion, the reliable Krenková makes for a sternly sympathetic heroine, though the MVP here is transgender actor Langdon, restrained and achingly vulnerable as a man still at odds with his own anatomy, who wants to be accepted without becoming a cause.
Chlupáček’s restless, roving direction is suitably energizing for a story built around tight deadlines and impending disaster — even if, between its heightened noir styling, Martin Douba’s hyper-kinetic lensing and an imposing, sometimes anachronistic score by Simon Goff (a Hildur Guðnadóttir collaborator, and audibly so), “We Have Never Been Modern” risks feeling aesthetically overwrought, albeit never dull. (Helena’s research into intersex biology is shown via beautiful, elaborately flowering animated interludes.) Meanwhile, the film makes a considerable virtue of a pitfall common to many such period pieces — where the lovingly researched and rendered production and costume design feels entirely too box-fresh, too unworn. Here, that slightly eerie newness is, like Douba’s super-saturated palette, wholly appropriate in a damning portrait of what one billboard terms a “town of the future” — a future that’ll come as a shock to its privileged, complacent architects.
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