Empties

Jan Sverak

Czech Republic

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Synopsis

A humorous portrait of the post-retirement antics of a cantankerous Czech.

REVIEW

This pungently funny meditation on senior citizenship by director Jan Sverák and his father, Zdenak Sverák, marks completion of their life-passages trilogy, which includes The Kindergarten (1991) and the Academy Award-winning Kolya (1996). Josef (Zdenak Sverák), a veteran Prague literature teacher, calls it quits at the middle school, rather than suffer another day talking ink in the age of iPods and e-books. His libido is less inclined to retirement, and he soon discovers that if he wishes to continue a lifetime of philandering, he will need a job to put him out of sight of his long-suffering wife Eliska (Daniela Kolárová). After a bone-jarring attempt at becoming bicycle messenger, Josef finds a more suitable second career manning a supermarket bottle-return window, a position affording him a birds-eye view of all the neighborhood has to offer in the way of ladies and local color. The Czech sensibility, famous for squeezing laughs from life's most banal humiliations, does not disappoint among the beer bottles. Sverák punctuates the skillful social sketching of this comedy of manners with the psychological slapstick of Josef's sex dreams. Still usable, Josef recycles his energies toward fulfilling the responsibilities of father, and husband, leaving death to its own devices. Empties opened in Prague to the largest box office in Czech film history.

-David Marc