Movie review: 'Beauty in Trouble' is an honest look at the complexity of love

For a country of 10 million, the Czech Republic has a powerful influence on world cinema. Battered by the tempests of history, with invaders conquering and retreating, regimes rising and falling, borders drawn and erased, its people have lived by their wits for generations and developed a unique attitude of droll pessimism. Czech filmmakers from Jiri Menzel (the recent "I Served the King of England") to Milos Forman have distilled the nation's identity crisis into works of biting political satire, comic humanism and lyrical eroticism.

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Now comes "Beauty in Trouble," a sublimely sexy and richly textured chronicle of social uncertainties by the directing/screenwriting team of Petr Jarchovsky and Jan Hrebejk. On the surface, it's a darkly droll love triangle, a marvelously observed and thoughtful examination of love, marriage, complacency, wealth, power and lust. Yet it's also shot through with political themes, skewering Czech society without ever becoming didactic. While some knowledge of the country's past adds a level of appreciation, you don't need a degree in European history to enjoy it.

Marcela (Ana Geislerova), a striking young wife and mother, and her macho husband, Jarda (Roman Luknar), are struggling to rebuild their lives after a flood ruins his Prague auto repair shop. Now he runs a chop shop, dissecting stolen cars to sell them as parts while Marcela raises the kids in a flat over the garage. When Jarda's car thief delivers a new Volvo equipped with a radio tracking security system, the police are close behind.

Waiting to visit Jarda at the police station, Marcela meets the car's owner, Evzen (Josef Abrham), a wealthy expatriate who takes a liking to her. With her man in the jug, Marcela moves her son and daughter to her mother's apartment. Her hilariously unpleasant stepfather (Jiri Schmitzer, a brilliant actor with the face and physique of a cadaver) makes the guests feel like squatters. Her mother (Jana Brejchova) is a bottomless reservoir of unwanted advice.

The gracious and charming Evzen feels responsible for her plight, and takes her out to expensive restaurants, where he introduces her to vintage wine and sushi. We cringe as Marcela swallows a pat of wasabi, but her gaffe makes Evzen feel all the more sophisticated and protective, and he offers to provide her room and board at his apartment.

While he holds the economic power, he's not the one controlling the courtship dance. A pragmatic opportunist with a romantic streak, Marcela weighs her options: an elegant life with Evzen in his Tuscan vineyard or a lusty one with her grease-stained roughneck.

It would be a challenge not to dislike Marcela except for Geislerova's delicious performance. Her pleasure as life becomes more hedonistic is so childlike and pure that she wins our sympathies. She's not just interested in improving her children's lot -- she wants to live the type of life that more fortunate women enjoy, and in return she provides Evzen with a relationship he clearly adores. At the same time, her love for the loutish, virile Jarda is hard to set aside. Geislerova creates a multifaceted woman who is making the best of an imperfect world, and the film's frank, nonjudgmental view of her choices is refreshing.

Abrham brings a sensitive comic touch to Evzen. With his quiet disdain for beer, Czech cooking and the avaricious crony capitalism of the local swindlers, he seems deeply out of touch with both the good and bad of his homeland: He's even reading Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" in Italian. He's generous to a fault, offering Marcela's poisonous father-in-law the use of his villa. But he's capable of steely resolve and shocking violence when provoked.

The plot is so busy that it would be hard to describe it in any detail. Besides, the film floats on complex character revelations and ambivalent relationships rather than linear narrative. "Beauty in Trouble" is filled with so many perfectly realized scenes, and so much lovingly observed human interaction, that it reminds us of the kind of honesty that the best movies can achieve.

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186