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fellow director Zhang Yimou in the lead role. Wang won the Golden Bear at the 2007
Berlin Film Festival for his film Tuya’s Marriage.
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Czech Republic
Protektor
Czech Republic, 2009, 98 minutes
Director: Marek Najbrt
Screenplay: Robert Geisler, Benjamin Tuček and Marek Najbrt
Camera: Miloslav Holman
Editor: Pavel Hrdlicka
Sound: Tomas Zubek, Marek Hart
Art Direction: Ondrej Nekvasil
Production: Negativ Film Productions
Synopsis
Emil Vrbata, a radio host, is in love with his wife Hana, pursuing together a life
they enjoy. It’s Prague 1939. Then comes war, and with it, German
occupation. To survive and protect his wife Emil chooses to collaborate.
Ultimately that threatens to destroy the very thing he is trying to protect:
Hana. In dark times, a man becomes a hero even if it’s the last thing he wants
to do.
Protektor is Marek Najbrt’s second film. His first, CHAMPIONS, won three Czech
lions (Czech Academy Awards).
The title is cunningly ironic. The film opens on a Prague street in 1942, with a
man, journalist Emil Vrbata, bicycling home furiously; it is the day that the
Butcher of Prague, Reinhard Heydrich, Reichsprotektor of Czechoslovakia,
has been assassinated. The film flashes back to the late 1930s, showing us Emil
and his wife (Marek Daniel and Jana Plodková, both superb), popular movie
star Hana Vrbatová, whose greater success tries her husband’s professional
self-esteem; he becomes her “protector” for real, however, when to spare
her reprisals, and to court success for himself, he joins a radio station and
propagandizes on-air for the Third Reich. Hana, you see, is Jewish. Emil’s
compromises to protect the love of his life generate horrible results. Now he is
ordered to divorce and denounce his wife. Proceeding ahead in time, even
beyond the (now comprehensible) 1942 starting-point, the loop-around
structure, suggesting a noose, pulls tight. Drawing on the closing shot of
Pabst’s Die Dreigroschenoper (1931), Protektor ends with a hauntingly out-offocus
evocation of the Holocaust.