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Herald rating: * * ** *
This densely textured film by the writer-director team responsible for the sublime wartime drama Divided We Fall (2000) displays the same giddy blend of realist drama and bleak humour in the fine absurdist tradition.
The several intersecting storylines exploit the title's multiple meanings (which include "down under"; one character lives in Queensland).
The film sees an upside and downside to everything. Hrebejk and writer Petr Jarchovsky tie their characters in ethical and emotional knots without pretending to believe in pat, happy endings.
Displacement is the one thing all the characters have in common. Everyone is an immigrant or emigrant or is touched, directly or indirectly, by a migrant experience.
A baby becomes separated from his mother, one of a group of smuggled refugees dropped in the country in the dead of night. The baby, sold on the black market, ends up in the hands of a woman, crazed by her longing for motherhood. She is with a man who is having difficulty leaving behind his thuggish racist history as a soccer hooligan.
Meanwhile, across the tracks, a wealthy family's secrets are about to be spilled when a long-estranged son comes visiting from Byron Bay.
However it sounds, the narrative isn't noisily disjointed like that of Amores Perros, say, or even artfully and intricately interwoven as in an Altman movie. Rather the stories run in parallel and intersect only glancingly and late in the piece.
Someone of lesser skill would have turned this into sloppy melodrama but Hrebejk creates an extraordinarily compact narrative and shows a masterful command of tone which never allows either comedy or drama to dominate.
The wealthy family's first lunch together in which the racist drunkard ex-wife complains that "in my apartment building, I'm the ethnic minority", while at least two people at the table are hiding an explosive secret is a miracle of control. The pitch-perfect performances help, in particular that of Forman, son of legendary director Milos, in a lead role, but this is a solid and richly satisfying film on all levels.
Cast: Petr Forman, Emilia Vasaryova, Natasa Burger, Jan Triska, Ingrid Timkova, Kristyna Liska-Bokova, Jiri Machacek, Vaclav Havel
Director: Jan Hrebejk
Running time: 108 mins
Rating: R16, contains violence, offensive language and sex scenes
Screening: Lido
Verdict: Richly satisfying Czech movie blends drama and absurdist comedy to tell the story about two families united and divided by migrant experience
