It’s not that people’s first instincts are bad in The Victim, the compelling and frightening debut of Slovak director Michal Blaschko. For example, a distraught Ukrainian mother returning to her foster home in the Czech Republic to be next to her injured son’s hospital bed, for example, would find someone willing to drive her when the bus was late. As soon as they find those instincts aligned with their own prejudices – for example, when a boy claims, or strongly insinuates, that those who beat him were of gypsy origin – then those same people will erase all the nuances, ignore in all the complexity, and do almost anything to drink more Intoxicated by righteous moral anger. Even if it means reinforcing a teen’s lie.
The mother is Irina (sympathetic, Vita Smachiluk), a hardworking housekeeper who aspires to open a hair salon with her friend Sveta (Inna Zulina), who is re-applying for Czech citizenship – after losing one last time in a technique. Her son, Igor (appropriately grumpy Gleb Kuchuk) is a promising gymnast, or at least it was until he arrived at the hospital with injuries so severe that he lost a kidney. When he regained consciousness after surgery, Irina was at his side, as was the local police investigator Novotny (Igor Shmila). With a barely perceptible movement, Igor, in response to a key question, noted that the three assailants who attacked him in the stairwell of his apartment building were “not white.” Suspicion immediately falls on the neighbors upstairs, a gypsy family headed by a single mother, with whom Irina already has a combative and mutually unfriendly relationship. The eldest son is duly arrested.
Blaško, working through a single instrumental script by Jakub Medvecky, keeps the focus on Irina, and on Smachelyuk’s wonderfully controlled but conflicting performance – which becomes especially risky once Igor admits to her that he made the attack, embarrassed by Injuries are actually while boating to impress a girl from school. By then, it is already too late to stop the overwhelming political power of conflicting private interests: the media are covering the story; Controversial local activist Silsky (Victor Zavadel) organized a rally and “March for Igor”. And the mayor of the municipality (Gabriela Mitova), sensing the political opportunity hidden in this potential quagmire, quickly offered Irina her support in the photo shoot.
So while Irina initially plots to cover up her son’s lie out of protective maternal motives, she quickly delves deeper, as she is offered the unexpected advantages and benefits of being a high-profile, root-accessible “victim”. Suddenly a hair salon, her Czech citizenship, and a larger apartment in a better neighborhood are within reach. All she has to do is ignore her nagging conscience and stick to a false and racist story.
Filmed by DP Adam Mach with grim Roman New Wave-style realism, in portable visuals that grow ever more intractable as the situation becomes insurmountable, the film highlights Irina’s moral crisis, as the police refuse to release the gypsy boy she knows. innocent. But her sharpest—and most depressing—visions may actually come from other directions. Sveta’s sweet reaction when, half a bottle of deep vodka, Irina admitted that Igor lied and that an innocent child was paying the price, is to go from supportive indignation if he was full of strife to “he would have ended up in prison anyway” without missing a beat. The always-realist Selsky, momentarily mistaken for Irina’s speech at the rally calling for the boy’s release, runs a terrifying but impressively quick-thinking pivot on stage to promote the broader, more dangerous fear and anti-Roman sentiment.
It is these aspects that give Blaschko’s film its advantage, when elsewhere he feels a little familiar – especially to fans of Christian Mungiu’s “The Graduation” – in his analysis of the damage that a corrupt society burdened with an agenda can inflict on a fundamentally decent individual, who becomes excruciatingly vulnerable. Growing after one serious but understandable motive.
While the film’s sympathies are schematically clear, it does to some extent do what it critiques in focusing the moral predicament of a white family that unfairly chose the title of “victim” and pushed the very tangible struggles of the gypsy family to the sidelines. who have already won. Irina’s final punishment is to remove the illusion of her child’s innate goodness, as her gypsy counterpart has to put up with the prospect of her child being taken away. Despite the unquestionable intentions and smooth, tense and fluid delivery, balancing these characters might be a little more than making for a more provocative movie. As it is, in terms of the skewed and bleached lens through which society views issues of systemic xenophobia, the “victim” is the victim itself.
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