The local cinema offers us each year a meeting with Czech cinema in a week that combines films from the Czechoslovak film school of the 1960s with movies recently produced in the Czech Republic. From this year’s selection I chose yesterday to see ‘Shotgun Justice‘, whose title in Czech, as if more appropriate to the ironic approach of the whole film, is ‘Teroristka’ (‘The Lady Terrorist’). The film is a combination of a comedy of situations and of a social satire, a film that aims to please and amuse the viewers, but also to tell some bitter truths about today’s Czech Republic.
The situation described in the film is well known to Eastern Europe viewers from their own countries where after the fall of communism the savage variant of market capitalism was installed, a world in which the “local barons” took control over villages, cities, or entire regions, hand in hand with corrupt politicians. This is the case of the village where the story of director Radek Bajgar‘s film takes place, until an old retired teacher decides that if she already lives in the Wild East dominated by the mob, where the rules of grammar and decency as well as the rule of law value nothing, the change must be brought with the methods of the wild East and with the weapons of the mob. A tragic situation approached with the tools of comedy, because, as you can imagine, a retired teacher does not easily become a professional murderer at the age of 72.
I liked the movie, despite some obvious weaknesses. The idea of the movie has a dose of welcome insanity. There is emotion in the story-telling, and the team of actors is performing reasonably well, despite a too rude split of roles between ‘good gals’ and ‘bad guys’. The actress who plays the lead role, Iva Janzurová , is probably a Czech film diva, she has personality, humanity, and a dignity that captivates viewers. The action is well constructed, although the key scene of the film looks more like filmed theater. Not everyone will be satisfied with the final that resolves the conflicts too easily and too well. The realities, unfortunately, are different, the spectators will say. Some of them will, however, add that it is desirable that good should prevail upon evil, at least in the movies.