My heart pounds, my strength fails me; even the light has gone from my eyes.
--Psalms 38:10 (Epigraph/quote that opens the film, before the titles)
Adrift is the third film
of a rarely discussed but important trilogy of director Jan Kadar (1918-79) that
includes the Oscar-winning The Shop on
the Main Street (1966) and The Angel
Levine (1970). Elmar Klos was the co-director of two films of the trilogy: The Shop on the Main Street and Adrift.
Hence, the trilogy can conveniently
be considered as the Jan Kadar spiritual trilogy on human beings’ tendency to
lose things dear to them due to their own follies. In all the three films, the
male central character is the pivot of the story and a major female figure dies
as a result of the male character’s actions. As Kadar was a Jew, the references
within the trilogy relate to the Old Testament of the Bible. (In contrast, the
wife of the central character is an ardent Roman Catholic, with paintings of
Mother Mary over her bed—a contribution of the novelist Lajos Zilahy.)
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| The mysterious Anada (Paula Pritchett) in the Danube |
Unlike the spiritual doubt trilogy
of the Swedish maestro Ingmar Bergman (The
Silence; Through a Glass Darkly; Winter Light) and the
spiritual/metaphysical Yusuf trilogy of the Turkish director Semih Kaplanoglu (Honey; Milk; Egg) which are built on
the original scripts of the respective directors, Kadar’s trilogy is made up of
three adaptations of three novels by three different novelists, chosen either
consciously or unconsciously by Kadar, to form the beads of a single necklace.
The novelists are Ladislaw Grosman (The
Shop on the Main Street), Bernard Malamud (The Angel Levine), and Lajos Zilahy (Adrift). Interestingly, Kadar’s Adrift is the third film adaptation of the same Zilahy novel. A Hungarian film Something in the Water was made in 1944 and a Mexican film Something Floats in the Water was made
in 1947, based on the same Hungarian novel. The novel ends with a miracle and a
happy ending—Kadar’s film does not.
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| The fisherman -- the good and the bad in us |
The tale of Adrift (and the novel from which the screenplay was adapted) is
simple. A rural family of a poor fisherman (Rade Markovic) on the banks of the
Danube River consists of a religious wife Zuzka (Milena Dravic), their teenage
son and the fisherman’s father-in-law. A
beautiful woman (Paula Pritchett) with no family or known history and a strange
name Anada is found floating in the river, presumably dead. The wife notices a
spot of life in the body and massages her back to life. The film is all about
the consequent impact of her presence in the family household at the insistence
of the wife.
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| Anada (Paula Pritchett): Is she real ,or a mermaid , or a mere figment of imagination |
More than the plot, it is the filmmaking
that grabs the attention of an intelligent viewer as in all Kadar films more
than the subject. The beginning and the end of the film are considerably similar,
with parallel events. It could easily confuse an inattentive viewer. The
consequence of the actions of the fisherman is never shown, only inferred by
visuals that need to be connected by spoken lines earlier in the film.
Kadar’s Adrift uses methods similar to those used in Andrei Konchalovsky’s Paradise (2016) where the principal characters
are answering questions on their motives and actions. In Paradise you do not see the questioner; in Adrift you see three male questioners who never reveal much about
themselves except their names (Melchior, Balthazar and Kaspar) while reassuring
the fisherman that they are not the police. In both films, the timing of the
questioning would seem illogical until the end of the film when the seemingly
illogical chronology falls into place. The three names will give away their true identities,
if the viewer is well read. These names are attributed to the three wise men
that came to see baby Jesus in Bethlehem. These names do not appear in the New
Testament of the Bible but emerged from a Greek manuscript written in the 6th
Century AD. The Catholic Church canonised these men into Saints Melchior,
Balthazar and Caspar. It is not surprising that the strange trio in the film talks
of attending christenings, weddings or wakes and finding a birth or a death. Their boat has a flag flying on it—it is a
simple black one.
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| Melchior, Balthazar and Caspar "interrogate" the adrift fisherman |
Some parts of the “interrogation” are
revealing. When the three men meet the fisherman for the first time, when he is
waking up on the banks of the Danube after having been “adrift,” they ask him
if he remembers anything, to which he replies “I remember nothing.” One of
the three men responds: “When things go
wrong you remember nothing.” Later
one of the mysterious three asks the fisherman about Anada: “Did you interrogate her?” The fisherman’s angry retort is “Who are you to interrogate me?” More revealing than the religion
in Adrift, are the words and actions
of the fisherman that reveal turmoil and contradictions within the fisherman’s
simple mind, which is indeed “adrift.”
The trio reassures the fisherman “We
only know what you know.”
When asked by the trio why he let
Anada stay with his family, the fisherman’s honest reply is “My wife wanted it ...” only to add on the
words “I love my wife.” He goes on
“... My wife’s stupidity.” The trio quickly
corrects him “You mean kindness.”
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| The wife Zuzka (Milena Dravic) embodiment of kindness reminisces as her husband prepares her medicine |
Truth and duplicity intermingle in
Adrift.
(Kadar seems to love this strange mix—exemplified in his lovely
adult “children’s film” Lies My Father Told
Me, a 1975 film he made in Canada.) Early in the film Adrift, the wife Zuzka reveals that she remembers that her husband
had revealed his love for her by stating that he would drown himself if she
died following childbirth. Fortunately, she and her son had survived the
childbirth. More than a decade later, when she falls seriously ill, as a devout
Catholic, she pledges all the money the poor family has to God if she is cured
for the sake of her husband and son. This why the words “stupidity” and
“kindness” during the interrogation sequence takes on an added significance.
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| The women Zuzka (right) and Anada (left) understand each other, which upsets the fisherman even further |
Kadar’s films have a style that
remains with you—the sudden use of music during certain types of activity,
which stops as suddenly as it begins. His camera tells you the end of the tale
as though it was a silent interloper. If you miss the important shots, the end
of the film would indeed befuddle the viewer.
After the end of the film the
viewer could reflect on the epigraph at the beginning of the film, though most
casual viewers might not see the importance of that exercise. Both Kadar and Konchalovsky are erudite directors
who believe epigraphs and end quotes add more value for the serious and well-read
viewer.
Kadar’s films are gems for viewers
who pay attention to details. He is definitely one of the best Czech/Slovak filmmakers
in film history. The three films in the trilogy are important for students of
cinema, even though rarely discussed in recent times.
P.S. The film Adrift won the Best Actress award at the Taormina Film Festival for Milena
Dravic who plays Zuzka, the wife. Kadar’s The Shop on the Main Street won the Oscar for the Best Foreign
Language film and an unsuccessful nomination for the Best Actress Oscar. Andrei Konchalovsky's Paradise (2016) has been reviewed on this blog earlier.
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