Šarlatán

Agnieszka Holland (2020)

Charlatan begins in December 1957 with the death of Antonín Zápotocký, Czechoslovakia’s president and former prime minister.  News reports record the passing of a ‘great communist’.  Zápotocký’s demise also marks the end of an era for herbalist Jan Mikolášek (1889-1973), the protagonist of Agnieszka Holland’s film.  Zápotocký believed that one of his legs, affected by gangrene, was healed and saved by Mikolášek’s plant-based prescriptions.  The latter had had other patients in high places – King George VI and Martin Bormann among them – but, as a money-making faith healer, he was anathema to the post-Zápotocký communist regime.  Holland, working from a screenplay by Marek Epstein, describes the state’s persecution of Mikolášek, leading to his arrest and eventual trial.  The narrative switches between these events and extended flashbacks to his earlier life, and it’s absorbing.

Long queues form outside his clinic to see the healer; other patients send a urine sample through the post.  Mikolášek (Ivan Trojan) can diagnose their condition simply by knowing a patient’s age and gender and examining their urine – under strong light but with the naked eye.  He prescribes treatment in the form of herbal teas or ointments, and trust in God.  His career begins close to home and with another gangrenous leg – that of his sister, Johana (Melika Yildiz).  Jan (played as a young man by Josef Trojan) applies ointment to the limb shortly before it’s due to be amputated.  The effect is remarkable.  As far as Johana is concerned, her brother has worked a miracle.

Mikolášek himself makes no such thaumaturgic claims:  his extraordinary diagnostic powers include the ability to perceive when patients are terminally ill and beyond his help.  (He can also accurately predict when they’ll die.)  The young Jan learns his trade under the tutelage of Mülbacherová (Jaroslava Pokorná), a herbalist in the rural community he hails from.  The word ‘trade’ seems apt enough in his case (though not in Mülbacherová’s):  the commercial success of his practice is enormous, and matters to him.  According to the film, however, there’s no doubt that he sincerely believes in the curative properties of his treatment.  So, it seems, does Agnieszka Holland.  She unequivocally takes the view that he’s not the charlatan the Czechoslovak authorities accuse him of being.

Charlatan suggests that Mikolášek fails to be who he’d like to be in a different way.  This devout Catholic is a troubled soul.  To the middle-aged Johana (Daniela Voráčková), her brother has become a bitter scourge.  There’s evidence of his hot temper from an early stage – Mikolášek bawls out any patient who displeases him.  A flashback to his traumatic experiences as a young soldier in the Great War, when he reluctantly obeys orders to shoot a fellow soldier, may signal his unresolved feelings about the cruel futility of life.  It’s otherwise hard to see why, for example, when Mülbacherová gives Jan a sack of kittens to drown, he instead dashes the sack against rocks, repeatedly.  As an older man, he’s in the habit of doing self-mortifying penance for his shortcomings.  At the foot of a woodland statue of the crucified Christ, he prays for forgiveness while kneeling on jagged stones.

His uneasy conscience may also connect with his sexuality.  The real Jan Mikolášek had a short-lived, childless marriage; once his practice had made him a wealthy man, he lived in a large house that was also the home of his male assistant.  It’s not known whether they co-habited in a sexual sense but Agnieszka Holland and Marek Epstein (not unlike Francis Lee in Ammonite) put two and two together – perhaps to make five, certainly to create a liaison that’s both the dramatic centre of their film, and a useful means of situating the main character in opposition to the society in which they lived.  Homosexuality in Czechoslovakia was still illegal in the 1950s.  Although it’s not among the criminal charges brought against Mikolášek, the authorities use it as leverage in interrogating him.

The relationship between Mikolášek and his much younger secretary František Palko (Juraj Loj) is not only well played but also well written (which helps make Charlatan more convincing than Ammonite).  In early scenes, set in the film’s present, František is essentially a background figure in Mikolášek’s surgery.  The fact that he has a room in the house doesn’t signify much until František, concerned by the authorities’ increasing interest in his employer, talks with Mikolášek in the latter’s bedroom and places a hand on his leg.  The tenderness of the gesture hints at more than an attempt to reassure.  Flashbacks from the mid-1930s onwards chart the development of their decades-long working relationship and love affair.  Interviewing candidates to be his secretary, Mikolášek angrily dispatches one interviewee, so unnerving the next in line that he invites František to take his place.  František marches in, explains he needs a job to support his wife and mother, admits he can’t type but says he can learn, fixes his interviewer with a penetrating smile, and promises Mikolášek complete loyalty.

This is a charged, puzzling scene.  František’s attitude seems to imply he knows that Mikolášek has a secret and needs an assistant who’ll keep it.  It’s not clear if this is thanks to local gossip or whether (bisexual) František, immediately he sees Mikolášek, intuits by gaydar his sexuality.  In either case, an encounter of this kind – between a good-looking, self-confident but financially needy youngster and a wealthy, repressed senior figure – might be expected to introduce a connection based on blackmail.  The audience, having seen the pair interacting twenty years into the future, already has evidence this isn’t how their partnership works out; Charlatan goes on to show that František, whatever his thoughts were on their first meeting, does show Mikolášek complete professional and personal loyalty – to an eventually self-sacrificing degree.  It’s a loyalty that isn’t reciprocated.

Holland illustrates the balance of power in their relationship through a pattern of sequences.  These show Mikolášek being rebuffed or sidelined; each such sequence is quickly followed by evidence that František capitulated and Mikolášek got his own way.  His first sexual approach is made while František is sleeping; he comes to and pushes Mikolášek away; a few screen moments later, they’re sharing a bed.  There’s talk of getting a car for František to use for regular visits to his wife (Jana Kvantiková) and mother (Jana Olhová).  Cut to the two men in the car, en route to sunbathing and love-making in the countryside.  (There is a scene at the Palko family home but with Mikolášek a guest there; František’s mother cottons on to the nature of her son’s feelings for his boss.)  When his wife is expecting a baby, František is infuriated by Mikolášek’s suggestion that she take a medicament that will end the pregnancy.  It’s soon clear that this is just what has happened.

The culminating proof of František’s devotion comes in what he doesn’t say while he and Mikolášek are in custody, and what he does say at the eventual show trial. Mikolášek faces trumped-up charges of causing the death, by strychnine poisoning, of two Communist Party bigwigs.  He has the services of a duty solicitor (Jirí Cerný).  Shortly before the trial starts, the solicitor tells him that František has resolutely refused to answer questions, so as to deprive the prosecution of evidence they might use to incriminate Mikolášek.  In the courtroom, František breaks his silence.  He states that, if medication from the practice did contain a lethal substance, the fault would lie with him, not with his employer – who doesn’t contradict him.  František’s taking responsibility isn’t enough for Mikolášek to avoid a prison sentence for tax offences and various corrupt practices.  It is more than enough to confirm the gulf between the two men in how far they’re prepared to go to protect one another.

It’s worth watching the closing credits through to the very end, when text on the screen explains that all characters in the film, except for Jan Mikolášek, are fictional.   This is baffling.  Does it mean (as it seems to) that, for example, Jan didn’t have a sister and saved her limb?  Or is it rather the case that names have been changed – to František Palko, for example – in order to ‘fictionalise’ real people?  Whichever, this closing statement is obviously inaccurate:  Antonín Zápotocký, for a start, is neither invention nor pseudonym.  Agnieszka Holland’s remarks in interviews announce a more familiar approach to biopic:  ‘Historical accuracy is not that important for me in this story.  What’s important is the character’s inner truth …’

Important yet elusive, though that’s among Charlatan‘s fascinations.  The DP Martin Strba’s camerawork is increasingly, but expressively, static:  it’s as if Holland is gazing longer and longer at Mikolášek in an unavailing attempt to see inside him.  One of the Czech Republic’s most celebrated screen and stage actors, Ivan Trojan achieves the considerable feat of making his character’s opacity less frustrating than it is magnetic.  His gimlet-eyed, severe intensity bespeaks a fierce inner turbulence which it’s a continuous effort to subdue and to mask.  Casting his son as the young Jan strengthens the connection to the older one, thanks to the Trojans’ facial similarities.  Josef prefigures Mikolášek’s solemnity and propensity for explosive anger; these qualities, which seem inchoate in the twenty-year-old Jan, have sclerotised in Ivan Trojan’s version of him.

The differently charismatic Juraj Loj invigorates the film and brings needed emotional texture and variety to it.  Now in his late thirties, Loj is a well-known television actor in the Czech Republic, but this, surprisingly, seems to be his first major cinema role.  Even while he’s only doing his job in the surgery, there’s a light in František’s eyes that suggests humour and sensitivity:  you want to know more about him.  That first meeting between Mikolášek and František is made memorable by Juraj Loj’s ebullient physicality.  In the conclusive trial scene, he seems, without the obvious use of make-up, to have aged far more than twenty years.  Among the generally well-played smaller roles, Jaroslava Pokorná’s Mülbacherová is outstanding.

After his release from prison, Jan Mikolášek didn’t resume his vocation, professionally at least.  He wrote his memoirs but it seems Marek Epstein drew little on these.  The Mikolášek of the film is a mixture of self-deprecating and self-aggrandising.  He several times reminds people he’s not a qualified doctor, having had no formal higher education.  He’s evidently pleased, for more than self-protective reasons, when his diagnostic skills impress the occupying Nazi regime.  Agnieszka Holland has said that Charlatan is ‘partly the story of a conformist … [his] passion for healing, and for keeping his power, were [sic] so great that he sacrificed his political opinions.  He knew he needed to play the game to survive, and he managed to do so for quite a long time’.  A few reviewers have taken the view that Holland accepts Mikolášek’s therapeutic genius to use it as a stick with which to beat totalitarianism – that she means, in particular, to present communism as no less faith-based a creed than herbalism.  I don’t see this connection.  Not only does Mikolášek dominate proceedings, obscuring his persecutors from view; he’s also too extraordinary a personality to seem representative of anything (though Holland, who is Polish, thinks that, as a ‘survivor’ he’s ‘a classic Czech character’).  He remains a conundrum, and in his treatment of people in his private life, a dislikeable one.  But Charlatan, following on the heels of the disappointing Mr Jones (2019), marks an intriguing return to form for its veteran director.

30 May 2021