Garden Store: A Family Friend

I spent a lot of time thinking about how I was going to enjoy Garden Store: A Family Friend. I missed the early premiere, and I missed the book trilogy signing in Prague, so I thought there was no point in rushing anything. I was more focused on the recent Aňa Geislerová films because of the long break between them, but fortunately, the last two followed each other quickly. We are going to be spending the whole year with Garden Store, that's for sure. The melancholic war melodrama presents a sequence of familiar scenes, but that's only because the collective memory retains similar family stories in each of us. The beautiful, reserved romance belongs to Aňa Geislerová, who greatly surpasses her partner Sokol in acting. It's a joy to watch Aňa in yet another war story, which has brought her protagonist gracefully going through a series of emotional upheavals. In terms of the other acting creations, I would overlook the traditionally weak and repetitive performances of Míčová and Melíšková, which are fortunately offset by the intuitive miniatures Krobotová and Remundová. The child roles are of course cute. Overall, I'm very happy with the concept of Garden Store. Even the genre distinction makes sense - The Protectorate is told as a melodrama (Hřebejk is well aware of its nostalgic value, as well as the quality cinematography of the time in the style of J. A. Holman), the post-February break as a chilling drama (no commentary needed), and the thaw will be a comedy. And that's just the way it was - or mirroring the pulse of history with genre - and I can only welcome that. And I do welcome it. (2017-05-10)

I remember when I saw a poster for the film somewhere and burst out laughing. So I'm not in marketing, but I'd love to watch from a distance to see how many moviegoers will be lured to the theater the by something called Garden Store: A Family Friend. A more settled and unexciting title next time please, said your great-grandma. Apart from that, A Family Friend is probably the strongest testament yet to the preserved and isolated creativity of Hřebejk and Jarchovský, where the dramaturg truly failed miserably. The result is a narrative avant-garde where time is distributed between plots, subplots, and illustrative moments in a completely bizarre way. So for the viewer, the film actually becomes a bit of an interactive adventure, where they try to guess from the film what it's about and what it’s actually trying to be. I would have thought I could better handle Sokol in a "serious" role since I've never actually heard him say anything funny so I don't consider him a comedian, except that his acting register occupies only a strangely infantile position in the range between a young Daniel Craig and an old Marilyn Manson. Then, at the end, I was fascinated by two shots, first when we see a panorama of a street in Terezin, which he cuts away from right after the camera crane starts to lift, and then the last one, where a character is obscured by a ceiling lamp, yet he still cuts after the actress reaches her mark, except that you haven’t been able to see her for five seconds. It clearly indicates that no one on the creative team watched it all the way to the end. I look forward with loathsome spite to the next installment, whose poster this time around suggests another solid slice of the wave of "new Czech weird cinema". (2022-08-29)

Rather than a classic film trilogy, it looks more like it’s going to be a film series with Garden Store. Otherwise, I can't explain why Hřebejk and Jarchovský would present so many characters in this film. Not only do they not affect anything the plot, but they instead disappear from it and it does not matter at all. I hope we get to see them next time. Otherwise, I liked A Family Friend, and particularly Martin Finger confirmed how great an actor he is. Aňa Geislerová and Ondrej Sokol worked great together and I have nothing against the long Christmas scene, because it felt pretty authentic and had the atmosphere that it was supposed to have. (2020-12-06)

Because of the promotion of Garden Store: A Family Friend, and in fact from the entire trilogy, we tend to have too high of expectations that simply cannot be fulfilled. Ondřej Sokol has a great role in the film, which deserved more than a few words at the end. When you think about it, he's actually the only one who stands out. The film lacks humor, and although the drama is good, it's too drawn out even in the first film. (2018-03-30)

A very weak and shallow film, suffering both for being the first of three (it’s rather more of an introductory film that only presents the characters and prepares the setting for the rest of the story), and for a number of film shortcomings at almost all levels, sometimes outright beginner mistakes, which is really shocking for Hřebejk. The story is terribly undramatic and lack conflict, and therefore feels very lazy, while any hint of at least a bit of interesting plot is always swept from the table right from the start. There is maybe about an hour of plot in the film and the rest is filler made up of purely "empty" and non-story passages, which slow down the film even more and unnecessarily stretch it beyond the limit of its carrying capacity. The chosen mood of the film, combining two completely incompatible genres - chaste melodrama and a beaming comedy in the style of Cosy Dens, trying in vain for similarly penetrating funny one-liners, really doesn’t work. You may laugh a few times, but nothing will affect you emotionally in the film in any way. The last hopes die at the end, when the film deals with the death of one of the main characters in a shameful way with a single sentence, moreover in voiceover and out of the picture, which truly is serious amateurism. The actors are great and the period styling is in fact excellent, but these are not enough to carry the film. The connection to Cosy Dens is minimal and rather disruptive, but we will what happens in the next episodes. (2017-04-27)