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‘Waves’ Review: Jiří Mádl Brings Compelling Life To Czech Oscar Entry
REad a review of 'Waves,' the Czech Republic's Oscar entry that focuses on a committed team journalists at Czechoslovak Radio during the Prague Spring of 1968.
In August of that year, Russian tanks rolled into Prague – along with the armies of five countries within the Soviet bloc – to crush Czechoslovakia’s new, homegrown version of communism, dubbed by foreign media “socialism with a human face.” Mádl catches them in passing, scruffy and vigorous; by contrast, the Brutalist architecture around them – the towering geometry of stairwells, the endless gray of hospital corridors, the threadbare apartment where the brothers live – is grim as death. Stylistically, Mádl’s work harkens back to the handsome art cinema that used to come out of Eastern Europe before the Wall came down; at the same time, he is not afraid to roughen up proceedings with a camera that swings between faces during an argument or to break the flow with a jolting splash of slow motion.
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