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‘Broken Voices’ Review: Exceptional Czech Drama Nimbly Deals With Abuses of Power in a Competitive Girls Choir
More 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' than 'Pitch Perfect,' Ondřej Provazník’s 1990s period drama explores a complicated #MeToo case involving a manipulative choirmaster.
Set in the early 1990s, before the influence of smartphones and social media, the empathy-minded psychological drama follows 13-year-old Karolína (Kateřina Falbrová), focusing largely on her desire to join the choir’s prestigious concert section, where her slightly older sister already performs. As played by Juraj Loj, the girls’ imperious, eponymous “master” comes across like a cross between Bradley Cooper and David Koresh: a forbidding (yet undeniably attractive) figure with an intense gaze, long hair and once-stylish wireframe glasses, clearly modeled on real-life culprit, Bohumil Kulínský. One might pick up on echoes of Sofia Coppola throughout — especially “The Beguiled,” in which a lone man is surrounded by young women — as “Broken Voices” emphasizes impressionistic childhood memories that can last a lifetime: collecting exotic crystals, riding the subway, studying adult behavior from across the room.
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