Writers: Vojtěch Mašek and Jan Polâček
Director: Vojtěch Mašek
Showing at the 27th Made in Prague Festival, Arvéd must be the strangest film to hit British screens this year. The film, about a Czech occultist and whistle-blower, won lead actor Michal Kern a Czech Lion, but while he puts in a good turn, the film is fairly impenetrable.
Czech audiences may have already heard of Dr Jiří Arvéd Smíchovský but anyone not familiar with Czech history will have a hard time understanding his life story as portrayed in Vojtěch Mašek’s film. It’s spliced out of chronological time and seems to contain hallucinations. Some scenes repeat themselves with only small details changed, a nod to parallel universes and a homage to the absurdity of Kafka’s The Trial, a book which is mentioned a few times during the film.
Like that novel’s Josef K, Arvéd is brought to many different officials who threaten to imprison him. However, Arvéd is offered rewards if he agrees to denounce various men. One reward is a beautiful young man, another, irresistible to Arvéd, is medieval magic books with stories of witches and spells to summon the Devil. It’s rumoured that he has already met the Devil; Arvéd was born a Catholic, but his is a broad church in the strongest terms. After all, if you believe in God, then surely you must believe in the Devil too.
We find out, sort of, that as well as selling his soul to Satan, he’s also sold his soul to the Nazi organisation the Sicherheitsdienst, an intelligence service akin to the Gestapo. He worked for the Sicherheitsdienst during World War Two, giving them names of Jewish people in return for the old books stored in the synagogues that were raided. After the war, he then gave the new government of the Third Republic the names of Czech Nazi collaborators. He became a professional informer, of sorts. He saw 49 people hanged, many of whom he considered friends.
But with a script co-written with Jan Polâček, director Mašek doesn’t make it easy for the viewer to follow this update of the Faust myth. It’s certainly intriguing to begin with, and the early interviews between Arvéd and various officials are played with menacing black humour. These interviews continue through the whole film interspersed with scenes of him praying with other black-hooded occultists or spending time in a book-filled apartment flirting with Vlastik (Vojtěch Vodochodsky), the man sent to spy on him.
After a while, it’s impossible to make sense of what is fact and what is merely delirium. Faust may have regretted his decisions when the Devil came back for his soul, but Arvéd appears to not have a conscience. He loves books more than he does mankind. His amorality should be inhuman, and yet Kern gives him an aura of corporeal disappointment, rooted, perhaps, in his homosexuality that the authorities use to their advantage. His intelligence – he boasts that he can quote any verse from the Bible – is both a gift and his curse.
The spectral scenes and the ominous score mean that while the narrative is as murky as the shadows in Arvéd’s prison cell, the film is still compelling, suggesting that soon the final piece of this dark difficult puzzle will be revealed. It never is, but to understand completely would imply that there is logic in Arvéd’s diabolical choices.
Arvéd is screening at the 27th Made in Prague Festival.