Word (Beata Parkanová, 2022) (Patreon)

Depictions of life under totalitarianism tend to focus on dramatic instances, moments when someone either buckles under to compromise or, sticking to their guns, must be eliminated. Word, a film about the years following the Prague Spring in 1968, takes a different tack. Thematically it resembles Terrence Malick's recent World War II biopic A Hidden Life. But where that film focused on a Christlike figure who held to his pacifist principles until they led him to the firing squad, Word suggests that many lives were ruined in much less spectacular ways.

The film centers on Václav (Martin Finger), a very well-respected notary in a medium-sized Czech town. He is known for his fairness, his probity, and his bureaucratic exactitude, serving the community as a legal mediator regarding matters of probate law. There is only one complication in his otherwise exemplary life. He supported the '68 rebels quite publicly, and when the bold experiment in "socialism with a human face" was quashed by the Soviets, he refused on principle to join the Communist Party. 

In a sense, Václav's refusal is practical. He prides himself on being an apolitical civil servant. But clearly his unwillingness is also a matter of ethics. He is repeatedly met at his office by party apparatchiks who try to wheedle him, and finally outright bully him, into signing a letter acknowledging his earlier political "naivety" and embrace the one true Party. And Václav continues to refuse, eventually making him an object of suspicion in the town and perhaps even putting his family at risk. His steadfast wife Vera (Gabriela Mikulková) sometimes catches the brunt of the community's frustration with Václav, as she and the kids are treated in a high-handed manner by other parents, shopkeepers, and the like. 

Beata Parkanová's approach to this scenario is impressively procedural, befitting a story about a low-level legal functionary. Much of the tension Václav's decision creates in the family is left unsaid. He is a stern but in some ways impractical man, heavily reliant on Vera's no-nonsense management skills. And although this dichotomy might have been the primary conflict in a lesser film -- a man of lofty ideals letting his wife sort out the harsh practicalities of his decisions -- Parkanová presents this complementarity of temperament as a sign of love and stability. And although the family ultimately faces consequences, they are less tragic than highly disruptive. Word shows that regardless of the time and place, sticking to your guns is almost always against one's own best interests.