Venice 2024 (Orizzonti Extra): After Party (by Vojtĕch Strakatý) | Review
Vojtěch Strakatý’s film After Party, presented at the 81st Venice Film Festival, impresses with its strong visuals and unique take on the coming-of-age genre.
After Party follows Jindřiška, who, after a party, suddenly faces her father’s problems and the collapse of her family’s stability. Director Strakatý shows how quickly Jindřiška’s familiar world falls apart, leaving many unanswered questions by the end.
The main character, Jindřiška (played by Eliška Bašusová), faces unexpected problems the morning after the party: strange men enter the house and start to take away valuable things. Everything falls under the fence: the TV, electronic equipment, and even a picture once drawn by 5-year-old Jindřiška. Even the coffee machine leaves the house. Jindřiška, as an adult, still lives under the family wing in the same house with her parents. From the very first shots, we learn about the family’s well-being and good financial prosperity. But it turns out, the father owed large sums of money to several people. Not answering phone calls, disappearing from the house, and as a consequence, Jindřiška, along with the viewers, learn that the father has not rented his usual office for several months. Unfamiliar men who turn out to be debt collectors come to collect her father’s debt, confiscating the family’s property. In this unfavorable way for all family members, the father puts his family in a very precarious position. In an instant, a cruel reality shatters all of Jindřiška’s ideas about her father and the family as a whole. The situation becomes more complicated when Jindřiška takes out a loan at her father’s request, to which her father promises that a large sum of money will be repaid in the coming weeks.
In order to avoid having her valuables seized again, Jindřiška moves her belongings to her friend’s house. All the events in the movie take place from dawn to dawn of the next day. The first scene takes place in the morning after Jindřiška returns from a party. At that moment, she is surprised to discover her father’s past and apparent “present,” which in turn comes as a shock to her. The very next morning, returning from another party, Jindřiška is confronted with a similar feeling, and it is at the sight of her father that the director leaves the viewer with many open questions about what decision Jindřiška has made for herself and what will follow. Thus, director Vojtěch Strakatý successfully uses the limited time frame to show how quickly the familiar world of the protagonist can be destroyed.
At the same time, it is worth noting the successful cast. Eliška Bašusová perfectly conveys the inner struggle of her heroine, her despair, and confusion. Anna Tomanová as Karolina adds lightness and optimism to the movie, her character serving as an important contrast to Jindřiška’s more gloomy state.
The visual style of the movie, its contrasts between sunny summer days and Jindřiška’s gloomy inner turmoil, reinforces the desired effect between the carefree scenes of young people spending evenings drinking, listening to music, and enjoying nature, and the harsh reality of the next day, which is so difficult and reluctant for the protagonist to believe.
The open ending, rather than offering food for thought, leaves a sense of understatement and incompleteness. After the emotional intensity and tension that builds over the course of the movie, the viewer misses any resolution to the conflict. One of the central questions that emerge is what truly drove the father’s actions: What really moved the father? In my opinion, the underdeveloped character of Jindřiška’s father leaves such a double-edged impression. The viewer is not sufficiently familiarized with the father figure. He plays a key role in the development of the plot, but his image remains under-explored. We see only the consequences of his actions, but we do not fully understand what motivated him. This reduces the emotional impact of the story: the viewer cannot fully understand whether Jindřiška should forgive her father and help him, or whether she should leave him in the past and move on and concentrate on herself.
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