Kopretiny pro zámeckou paní

This harmlessly silly summer comedy for adolescent girls draws on the politically neutral setting of a fictional castle (it was actually filmed at Bouzov) and the unaffected speech of Sylva Julinová (who didn’t devote herself to acting beyond this summertime diversion). Despite that, Marguerites are not entirely without meaning for the given period. The issue of theft crops up in the dialogue more than once (the soothing statement that only hens are stolen; the question of whether only replicas are displayed in the castle because of thieves), the characters of the villagers show a pathological provincialism in relation to the ridiculed “Prague boy” and, despite the film’s attempt to accentuate the girl’s perspective more (the boys are awkward, the parents don’t understand anything), she reveals herself in the end to be a “sheep” who has to be shepherded to the right place by an understanding member of the police. No less characteristic of normalisation is the father’s devastating inability to self-actualise, because his wife has the final word (inactive nature of men vs. active nature of women, which was considered to be politically less dangerous) and the temporal setting of the plot during the summer holidays, when there is a notional stoppage of time. Overall, however, the film succeeds in unshackling itself from the period in which it was made. The atmosphere of innocent summer games, disrupted only by a disturbingly serious attempted rape, is infectious, the educational dimension is tolerable, and I will gladly add half a star for the retro goodness of unshaven underarms and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. 55% (2015.08.14)