Movie Details
Piargy(2022)
Director: Ivo Trajkov
Cast-Judit BárdosAttila MokosLucia Klein Svoboda
Movie type- horror and drama
Release date- September 22, 2022
IMDB Rating-7.2
Languages- Slovak with English subtitles
Duration-1 Hour 40 Minutes
Trailer
Synopsis
The clero-fascist Slovak state is a materialized hell on earth that deserves a punishment of biblical proportions. The emphasis on the church as the core of rural society went hand in hand with uncompromising anti-Semitism and the promotion of absurd superstitions and gossip. The Slovakian-Czech historical drama Piargy benefits from real realities and presents a lyrical picture of the pre-war countryside, the themes of which resonate even today.
The originally Macedonian director Ivo Trajkov made his most significant mark with the already thirty-year-old and somewhat bizarre comedy Kanárská spojka, in which the music manager, played by Karel Roden, became involved in the mafia’s efforts to obtain the recipe for Becherovka. Since this extremely poorly rated debut, Trajkov directed a number of other films, which, however, did not make a significant impression on the audience. Piargy is all the more surprising – it is a sympathetically stylized work straddling modern classics such as Sekala must be killed and Bílá stuha , possibly reminiscent of the recent Servants or the horror film The Witch .
The film can be seen in cinemas in Slovak with Czech subtitles, which may surprise many, but given the occasional archaic language, it is a useful aid. The period atmosphere is underlined by the black-and-white camera, which also emphasizes the contrast of moral decisions, and the dark musical tones and sound warning of the constant presence of a fatal threat are also pleasing. In this regard, Trajkov’s team cannot be blamed and the film goes far beyond the routinely processed contemporary movies that we see on television as a standard. The drama also contains a surprisingly large number of tricks, mainly consisting in finishing the landscape, but even thanks to the black-and-white visuals, the effects do not draw attention to themselves and do not distract the viewer’s attention from the essentials – and that should be the story here.
So far, only serial screenwriter Jana Skořepová has based her work on a short moralistic novel by František Švantner, which is one of the literary classics in Slovakia. While Švantner focused on the traditional themes of crime, guilt and punishment, Skořepová updated the narratives with the position of women in society. However, the lyrical prose format remained, which in the film adaptation manifests itself in realism with occasional moments of the supernatural, completely in line with the symbolism of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The fictional Slovak village of Piargy is also reminiscent of sinful biblical cities afflicted by God’s punishment. On the eve of the Second World War, there was not only the ostracization of Jews and the confiscation of their property, but also the oppression of women and other minorities. Perhaps this is also why the mountain village is swept away by an avalanche during the Mardi Gras celebrations, as we learn at the very beginning. In retrospect, we learn about the number of sins that took place in villages blessed by the church, but parched in value.
The main character is a young girl Juliša, played by Judit Bárdos, who, against the will of her friend, marries the son of a local landowner. While the distressed young man Martin (Daniel Fischer) would like to run his own shop, the domineering and selfish father (Attila Mokoš) does not want to allow him. Juliša thus finds herself in a strange love triangle, as she cannot resist the powerful pressure of the embittered man under whose roof she is forced to live forever.
The first twenty minutes or so are rather confused, but they stimulate the audience’s curiosity. After the wedding of Martin and Juliša, the narrative becomes clearer and becomes a family morality play with touches of folk horror, but unfortunately the wider social context including the pressures of the church and the fascists is abandoned. This is quite a detriment, as are a number of hard-to-explain decisions in character behavior. The script would have deserved more chiseling, thanks to which some of the twists would not seem so contrived, but would, on the contrary, underline the truly tragic fate of the characters.
The director Trajkov himself mentioned that, in his opinion, the film is about freedom of choice, specifically the absence of it, since the characters in the film are always decided by some hard-to-grasp forces. This is undoubtedly a very interesting idea, but unfortunately it was not able to be printed in the final work to the extent that the viewer was really emotionally affected by the plight of the characters or could better imagine the moral misery in the given time and space. Yes, one can certainly find a whole range of parallels with the present.
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