Martin aulik’s second feature is a complex and imaginative work that analyses the relationship between Tomaa (Juraj Nvota) and Ann, a young teacher of English (Gina Bellman). The film extends to wider issuesohis divorce, leaving his son, and relations with his parents. A crisis of identity is effected through the impact of Western influences (his wife constantly refers to his English girlfriend as ‘American’) and his thoughts of going to England. Unfortunately, he observes, this is not possible since ‘I’m Slovak’. The film is interspersed with various evocative sub-headings: ‘Sunrise’, ‘Escape with Balloon’, ‘Something from Joyce’, ‘Picture from an Old World’, ‘Thoreau, Kant, Goethe, and others’. Bleak, poetic, and evocative, it is a film in which one has the constant sense that ‘life is elsewhere’.
Czechoslovakia [Slovakia], 1992. English subtitles. Colour. 96 min.