Kolya

Kolya won an Oscar for best foreign language film, which is understandable enough, for the film has many qualities. Not only does it tell a humanly interesting and gripping story, it also reaches beyond the personal level by telling of the political situation in Czechoslovakia.

The film is set amid a time of global upheaval in Prague in the late eighties, when the Russians are still in power in Czechoslovakia but have begun to loosen the reins a little. Louka is a 60-year-old cellist who was once branded a Soviet sceptic by the authorities, so he has been stripped of the right to play in the symphony orchestra. Instead Louka plays at funerals and has various odd jobs on the side. He longs ardently for a Trabant, but when you also have a mother to support, savings are thin and debts are larger.

A good friend offers Louka a particularly well-paid job. Louka, a bachelor, is to enter a sham marriage with a Russian woman who wants a residence permit in Czechoslovakia. Louka lets himself be tempted by the money, and everything goes like clockwork until the bride slips off to West Germany to join a lover, leaving her five-year-old son Kolya with Louka. The grandmother, who was supposed to look after Kolya, is admitted to hospital and dies shortly afterwards, leaving Louka as the only relative.

Kolya movingly portrays the relationship between the confirmed bachelor Louka and Kolya, a little boy alone in the world and tired of it. It doesn't help that language problems come on top of it all, for Kolya speaks only Russian and Louka only Czech. Naturally the man and the boy grow close and become like father and son. Louka, who in the past has distinguished himself by behaving quite irresponsibly, now learns to shoulder responsibility for the child's life. This idyll cannot last, however. First the police are on Louka's back, as they rightly suspect him of having entered into a sham marriage. When the Russians are out of Czechoslovakia, Kolya's mother comes to fetch him.

There is no doubt that Kolya exploits child actor Andrej Chalimon's cute face and long dark eyelashes, but that aside, the film tells a moving and realistic story that gains from also containing a bigger story.