Little Otik

I. Viehoff

at 8:27 pm

Alice is my favourite of Svankmajer’s full length films, but this is goood to have too.

In Czech, this movie is called Otesánek, which means “The little hewn one”. It takes the name from a Czech fairy tale, in which a tree stump roughly carved into the shape of a baby comes to life. The wooden baby rapidly grows to have a voracious appetite and turns into a terrifying monster, only to be eventually defeated by a little old lady who grows cabbages. But this is not a movie for children.

In the film, Bozena is a woman distraught by her sterility following a miscarriage. Babies are imagined everywhere – being sold like carp or coming out of watermelons. At their summerhouse, her husband Karel digs up a tree-stump with features that suggest a child, and he carves it to shape and varnishes it. Bozena starts madly to treat it as a real child. Unable to dissuade her in normal terms, Karel humours her by saying she can’t take just turn up at home with a baby because people would think she had stolen it. So Bozena makes 9 cushions to fake a pregnancy, so that she can take the Otesánek home after 9 months. Karel finds himself increasingly drawn in to maintaining the pretence of pregancy for neighbours and work colleagues. Eventually Bozena fakes labour, and is concealed for a week with her Otesánek before bringing home the “baby”. Karel finds himself surrounded by neighbourly celebrations for his fatherhood, and feels forced to say he has a boy and calls it Otik.

Animation breathes life into the Otesánek – leaving us initially unsure whether this for real or just in Bozena’s imagination. Bozena now creates the pretence of a real baby, and asks Karel for ever more extreme action to maintain the pretence and cover up the consequent disasters. Meanwhile the neighbour’s chubby little girl, Alzbetka, is reading fairy-tales, and is of an age to be curious about the mating habits of humans. She sees more of what is going on than the adults around her. Starved of company of other children, she finds her own affection for the Otesánek, and tries to prevent it ending in the same way as in the fairy tale.

Alzbetka is a star – Svankmajer seems to have a talent for finding little girls who can act. There is much delightful social commentary on Czech life and upbringing – the working-class neighbours, the lecherous old man upstairs, the cabbage-growing nosy concierge, the boozy work colleagues, the inevitable attention of the authorities. The overt – but inexact – parallelism of the fairy tale and the film’s own story is a beautiful structure that leaves one with sufficient uncertainty about what will happen. The goings-on are delightfully weird, and at times less than delightfully gory. There are many lovely comedic touches, such as the gynaecologist distracted in mid consultation.

There are a couple of slight disappointments in this film which knock a star off. The first is the Karel figure, who is tearing his hair out at the start of the film, and so has nowhere to go emotionally when the situation starts getting a lot worse; his act is repetitive and unconvincing. The second is that I really would like more animation, after all, that is JS’s star turn. The film goes too long before we get more than about 10 seconds worth.
Rating: 4 / 5

Louise Stanley

at 12:34 am

This is just hilarious. Although over-acted, Svankmajer has created a sickening, terrifying update of the Czech fairytale Otesanek, set in a block of flats in an anonymous Czech town and a country dacha where what begins as a benign wooden doll for a childless couple turns into a ravening monstrosity lurking in the cellar, looked after by a girl whose loneliness turns her into the devil incarnate when Otik begins to get too hungry for leftover soup and dumplings.

The stop-motion animation is worthy of the noble tradition of Eastern European film, and does not attempt to make it too realistic, a fact which tends to jar with the gritty reality of the film (particularly the editing when they cut to Otik can give a bit of a jerky effect to otherwise seamless footage) but it fits with the wild and wonderful nature of European storytelling and the tragicomic story, with a slow transition from a hungry baby to a gargantuan godzilla ripping the vital organs out of passersby.

Bozena Horakova’s innocence and naivete give some insight into how the mothers of real tearaways feel when their son or daughter goes off the rails, and helps us understand the powerful bond between mother and child which can forgive everything, even chewing up the postman (“well, he *was* going to retire anyway…”) or the social worker (“she *was* an arrogant old busybody…”). Her desperation is contrasted with the nonchalant responses of Stadlerova, her husband and daughter, and the other residents, all of whom stand and watch Bozena’s descent into madness and Karel’s ineffectual attempts to destroy the creature before it is too late.
Rating: 5 / 5

Peter Scott-presland

at 3:16 am

“Little Otik” is a comedy horror flick which tries also to incorporate elements of social satire and folk myth, not entirely successfully. Jan Svankmajer is a veteran Czech director from the heady days of Czech cinema in the 1960s, who has come increasingly into his late flowering since the wall came down. This early background was in animation (I particularly recommend the delightful short, Rakvickana, in which Punch and Judy fight to the death for the custody of a (real) guinea pig – Jan Svankmajer – The Complete Short Films [DVD] [1964]). A satire on greed, capitalism and communism which is a surrealist masterpiece.

This mixture of live action and animation is something Svankmajer excels in. Here he takes the poignant social situation of a childless couple’s longing for a baby, and pushes it to surreal extremes. The man, Karel (Jan Hartl), exasperated by the relentless focus of his wife, Bozena (Veronika Zilkova), on the child she can never have, makes her a wooden doll out of a tree root. It’s not a very convincing doll, and how exactly this will assuage her is never quite clear, but hey, this is a folk tale. The doll comes to life, and starts eating, and eating. And eating. The parents desparately try to keep up, in the way small birds try to feed the cuckoo in the nest, but nothing is enough. But whatever Otik does, however difficult he becomes, Bozena always loves him, because he is her Baby, and Baby can do no wrong. Karel on the other hand wants to be rid of him, although his resolve is always undermined by his wife and the residual parental feelings he has in spite of himself.

I won’t spoil the plot for you because it’s a corker. It takes place in the context of a block of flats, which gives Svankmajer the opportunity to make satiric swipes at Czech society in general – the broadshouldered Granny, the peasant in the city and no doubt salt of the communist earth, who does nothing but grow cabbages; the elderly paedophile on the top floor; the nosy neighbours; the appalling cooking….

Among the neighbours are Alzbetka, a ten-year-old girl played with frightening aplomb by Kristina Adamcova, a major child star who has done virtually no acting since). Alzbetka is knowing, self-sufficient, and deeply contemptuous of all adults but especially her ineffective alcoholic father, and her mother who spends all day doing nothing but preparing disgusting glop for dinner. (The revolting process of eating is something the film dwells on to great comic effect.) She is the only one who susses what is going on, but paradoxically befriends the monstrous Otik, again for reasons not entirely clear – possibly because she wants to see how the old folk tale pans out?

At 132 minutes the film is way, way too long, and the incidents start to get repetitive. There is also a weakness in the performance of Jan Hartl (the father), who starts at too hysterical a pitch and therefore later has nowhere to go, becoming irritating and repetitive. Everyone else, though, is pitch-perfect. Svankmajer has a fine visual imagination and sense of humour. And there is one moment which is an all-time cinema classic moment. To serious students of film it is a classic illustration of the power of the sound track. All I’ll say is, look out for the social worker…..

Rating: 4 / 5