František Vláčil’s Marketa Lazarová (1966) has been voted the best Czech film ever made, a visionary 13th century epic whose expense prompted its director to shoot the shorter, lower-budget The Valley of the Bees (Údolí včel) back-to-back with it.
Recycling Marketa Lazarová’s lavish sets and costumes proved impossible, though both films share a vivid sense of time and place. Zdeněk Liška again provided a stark, haunting score, though large stretches of The Valley of the Bees are devoid of both music and dialogue. We first meet Petr Čepek’s Ondřej as a taciturn adolescent, incurring his father’s wrath by presenting his young stepmother-to-be with a basket containing live bats. Ondřej’s father flings him against a wall in a fit of rage, and, fearing for his life, promises to give his son to the Order of Teutonic Knights if he survives.
Ondřej duly takes the vow, promising to renounce his father and mother and to resist all forms of temptation. Jan Kačer’s Armin acts as Ondřej’s mentor, seemingly convincing him that “suffering is the way to God”, their close relationship encapsulated by a shot of them lying side by side naked in the icy Baltic Sea in an effort to “numb the lower body for the sake of the spirit”. After witnessing a fellow knight brutally killed after attempting to flee, Ondřej decides to escape and head back to Bohemia, Armin soon charged with tracking him down and returning him to the Order.
Armin doggedly pursues his quarry. We watch him attempt to cope with the baffling realities of secular life, struggling with his vows when encountering a blind young woman who he’s not permitted to look at or touch. An attempt to rescue a reluctant Ondřej from a cabal of charcoal burners ends in violence, Ondřej knocking Armin unconscious with a rock, blood seeping out of his mouth into a puddle. Vláčil presents him as invincible, Armin’s dark silhouette reminding Ondřej that he took a vow and has no option but to return with him. Things take a still darker tone when Ondřej returns home, Armin’s reappearance as shocking as it is inevitable, Vláčil teasing us with a split-second glimpse through an open window. The film works both as a taut period thriller and a chilling depiction of religious fanaticism and intolerance; predictably, things end very badly.
Second Run’s reissue uses an immaculate HD transfer and looks terrific. Peter Hames’s booklet essay discusses the the links between Marketa Lazarová and The Valley of the Bees, and outlines Vláčil’s career after the 1967 Soviet invasion. Two short documentaries from 1972 are included as bonuses, The City in White a beguiling portrait of a snowy Prague.
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