By Ali Moosavi.
It was clear for us that we wanted to have an observer’s perspective so that it feels like I am invisible and standing with the camera and looking at these people.”
–Alexandra Makarova
One of the films showing at this year’s Rotterdam Film Festival is Perla by the Slovakian director Alexandra Makarova. It tells the poignant and often harrowing story of a mother and daughter from Slovakia in the eighties, before the breakup of Czechoslovakia. Perla (Rebeka Polakova) and her daughter Julia (Carmen Diego) are Slovakian refugees from Czechoslovakia living in Vienna. Perla is a painter and a free soul. A chance meeting with Josef (Simon Schwarz), an Austrian, leads to marriage, perhaps more out of need and convenience than love. Josef, however, loves Perla deeply and spares no effort in looking after and providing for both Perla and Julia. Perla has a troubled soul as a result of what happened to her back in Czechoslovakia. A phone call from her ex-husband Andrej (Noel Czuczor), who still lives in Czechoslovakia, prompts her to visit her homeland, despite strong protests by Josef. This visit turns out to be very painful, in more ways than one.
Perla is an emotional and disturbing film, made with passion by Makarova. It is affectionate and harrowing in its portrait of an artist and a mother who, even in the freedom afforded to her in the West, cannot free herself of the demons occupying her tormented soul.
I talked with its writer-director Alexandra Makarova.
You were a small child when Slovak Republic became a country after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia. So was the film based on things you heard from your family and friends and what you read? Where did you get all the ideas and the events in the background in your movie?
I was born into family of refugees because the parents of my grandmother had to flee Russia as they were members of the White Guard. Most members of the family were killed in 1917 and part of them escaped through Czechoslovakia because there was a government for the exiled Russians and after the war in 1945 my grand grandfather was captured by the Red Army and spent 10 years in Gulag in Siberia. The stories about the concentration camps and the war were always on the table in my family. So I kind of I have that in me, whether I want or not. I always think about war and maybe it’s a transgenerational trauma. But I was always interested in these stories about escaping and hiding and not speaking your mother tongue and not being able to get back to the country where you were born. My mother went to Austria after the fall of the Iron Curtain and from my family nobody stayed in Czechoslovakia except my grandmother, so we are a family of travelers.
Was there any particular accident which made you think about making this movie or just a collection of different events?
It was just a collection of different things because this feeling of being a foreigner in another country and the fear that the country’s political situation may change is ingrained in me, even now that I’m in Vienna. I think the first idea for me was to tell the story about this very resilient woman and mother and artist who fights for herself and for her freedom to be an artist and to live her life as she wants. I know such women in my family because most of the people who suffered during the war and after the war in my family were women and children and then children of the children, so it’s a never ending chain of memory.
One of the main themes of the film is the relationship between a mother and daughter. You went with your mother to Vienna; so how much of the story was based on your own experiences with your mother?
A lot, more than I wanted! In the beginning it was more focused on the mother-daughter relationship and later it focused more on Perla and less on her daughter. I had a very hard time with my mother because she was very young, she was 19 when I was born. The first few years I lived with my grandparents in Czechoslovakia and then, just after the fall of the Iron Curtain, she took me to Vienna and we lived together. She was a wild and free artist, always partying. I had no father, so I had to be very adult, more than she was, that was always my struggle until I was in my 30s and then I had a child too. My point of view changed a lot through that, but that was important to me because the generic view of motherhood is always the same; we have this Mother Mary icon who suffers for everything and everybody, but that’s not true because as a mother you are always by yourself and you have to look after yourself. I think that’s very important and we see that for example in France women are more emancipated then in Austria or every Slavic country.
In one scene Perla tells Joseph: you don’t understand, you’re not from here. Do you think you have to have been from there and lived that life to fully understand the people there, because he cannot understand why she wants to go back with all the accompanied risk and trouble.
In this particular story she is a very complicated character. Not everyone who fled would go back but she has this attitude of never looking back and always looking to the future. For him of course this is stupid, it’s just too risky and it’s not rational. When she says you’re not from here and you don’t understand, I think that is true because that is one sentence which I heard many times and I always thought that’s just in my family but then I found that many people from Slavic countries think the same way. For example if someone gets sick, you tell to get over it. It’s this way of thinking, even if it’s hard, you get over it.
You paint a very stark picture of Slovakia during that time. We see the big lines at supermarkets and bakeries and in one scene when Perla orders a lot of food, an old man berates her for eating so much when people are starving. Did such details about the mentality of the people and their conditions come from your talks with friends and families?
Yes, from friends and family because they all had experienced it. People who lived in that time know that, I know it from the stories I’ve heard from folks. I did a lot of research which I loved doing. It was important for the art directors. For example we have a scene where Julia unpacks this gift-wrapped projector and the guy from props showed me some wrapping papers and I sent it back to him and said no because we only had one pattern at that time and it was always the same and even one type of toilet paper which was grey and thin. Even so, it was much better in Czechoslovakia than for example in Romania or Poland.
I also didn’t want to show the gray concrete buildings because it was not all about the communist architecture. Czechoslovakia had the First Republic and before the war the architecture was similar to Austria or Italy. That’s why I chose this hotel which was built during the First Republic and the golden era of Czechoslovakia.”
You have a very long disturbing rape scene in the movie which you have shot in a very dark and bleak way. It’s like we are witnessing it, because it’s shot from our point of view, but we are helpless and cannot do anything, so that makes it even tougher to watch. Can you talk about filming that scene?
For me it was even hard writing a scene like that in the script. I didn’t want to see yet another rape scene. I tried to show it from the point of view of a surveillance camera in the forest and not to show her face. We had some shots from her face and from his face and but it didn’t feel right. I wanted to show the banality of evil because it is for me the banality of how the soldiers act. It’s not too violent, they’re not hitting her but I imagined how that scene could happen. It is a long scene; in the film it is about four minutes and in the first cut it was about 6 or 7 minutes. It was not very pleasant to shoot.
You have highlighted the differences between East and West by shooting most of the scenes in Slovakia in a very bleak way and with dark colours whereas the scenes in Vienna are very colourful and full of light.
Yes of course, because people behave differently in a country where you can sing, where you can say what you want, where you have open press and people even behave different physically; they sit differently in the subway or in the bus as they did in Czechoslovakia. So that was important to me. I also didn’t want to show the gray concrete buildings because it was not all about the communist architecture. Czechoslovakia had the First Republic and before the war the architecture was similar to Austria or Italy. That’s why I chose this hotel which was built during the First Republic and the golden era of Czechoslovakia.
Andrej keeps telling Perla that I’m the one who suffered. We know that he was separated from his wife and daughter and remained in Slovakia but the worst thing that we see in the movie is what happens to Perla during that rape scene; so it’s difficult for us to sympathize with Andrej as we don’t know whether he was subjected to torture, harsh prison conditions, etc.
It’s interesting because I sympathize a lot with him. For me it changed completely during filming and editing and I totally switched to his side because in my opinion he is the real loser of the whole story. Because he’s not able to let go. he’s unable to forgive, he’s not able to get on with his life. He went to prison and he lost everything. He didn’t know what happened to his wife and their daughter as she cut off contact with him. He knows that his family will suffer because when someone tried to flee the country, the whole family, even cousins, were not able to study anymore. So I think it’s a big burden for him.
When Perla returns to Slovakia, still part of Czechoslovakia, it’s difficult to sympathize with her taking such a risk for her and Julia. As soon as they enter the hotel in Slovakia there is an atmosphere of menace and threat from then onwards. A very disturbing scene is these men, dressed like the Droogs in A Clockwork Orange harassing women. Is that a custom in Slovakia?
Yes, it’s a custom that people do on Easter Monday and it’s also in Czech Republic but more in Slovakia and more in the villages. It’s supposed to keep the women healthy! So the men start in early morning going to houses of unmarried women, taking them out and throwing them into water and beating them with wooden sticks and the women have to give them eggs or sweets or alcohol or money as a gift! By noon the men are completely drunk and it’s still a custom which I also experienced when I was a child in a village near the Ukrainian border. It was terrifying because you could hear screams of the women all over the village and you knew that they will come to your house. I knew they would not kill me and it’s also kind of fun when you’re a teenager but I couldn’t understand then that it’s not normal and nowadays it still happens. We actually shot those scenes a week before the real event takes place. We had some extras from the village in that scene and during a break one of them, a man in his seventies, came to Rebeka and said are you excited for next week and she said no why, and he said but you like it and she said no I don’t know any woman who likes it. He said to her but you want to stay healthy, don’t you?! I realized that he really believes it. This generation still really believe that if you don’t do this to women they will get sick during the year! During shooting we called them the Droogs!
The visual element of the film and framing of the shots is very interesting. Can you tell me about your work with your cinematographer and the decision making process about the shots and look of the film?
It was a long process. We’re both nerds film nerds and I really enjoyed this part of the of filmmaking. We watched a lot of films together and we had to figure out what does the 80s mean to us and to the audience. It’s certainly not the 80s that we know them from American movies because it was completely different in Europe but it’s also not like the 80s in documentaries. We realized that we are looking for colors like those in photographs from 50s and 60s. It was clear for us that we wanted to have an observer’s perspective so that it feels like I am invisible and standing with the camera and looking at these people. We also realized that in a film that is set in the past, the color palette is critical and the costume design is more important than the art direction for the cinematography.
The music is very integral to your film. As examples, the scene when Julia is playing a Bronski Beat song on the piano and the scene in a bar where there is jazz saxophone in the background, the music really blends with the scenes.
I’m a big score lover and love original film music and our music composers Johannes and Rusanda were on board two years before we even starting shooting and began composing the music. In the beginning, before we started shooting, the music was much more classical and then it changed completely. It was clear that I cannot use it as it would romanticize the film. The bar scene you’re talking about, I’m a big fan of Krzysztof Komeda who composed the music for all the early Polanski films. I love jazz and I love Polish jazz from the 60’s and 50’s so that was our approach that this kind of music could have been played in this bar in Czechoslovakia, certainly not pop music and it has something from film noir.
Ali Moosavi has worked in documentary television and has written for Film Magazine (Iran), Cine-Eye (London), and Film International (Sweden). He contributed to the second volume of The Directory of World Cinema: Iran (Intellect, 2015).