Jakub (Roman Luknar), who is having an affair with a married woman, is thrown out by his father (Marian Labuda) and takes over his grandfather’s deserted house and garden in the countryside. Like Martin aulik’s earlier films, this is again about characters in crisis, but the director is also concerned with the imaginative world. Jakub meets Helena (Zuzana aulajova), a pubescent neighbour and ‘miraculous virgin’, and learns to understand what is normally ‘not understandable’. Helena’s mirror-image writing has been learned from his grandfather and their magic garden is visited by passers-by with names like Rousseau and Wittgenstein. An intimate chamber film with a sensitive music score by Vladimir Godar, it introduces us to a world in which cats, dogs the absurd, and the surreal all have a role to play.
Slovakia/France, 1995. English subtitles. Colour. Dolby stereo. 99 min.