A lacquered Czech period piece with surprisingly topical interests at its core, We Have Never Been Modern rather ambitiously borrows its title from a key text by the late French philosopher Bruno Latour in which he argued that humanitys distinction between nature and our own culture is a wholly modern development, and one wed do best to move away from. While Latours ideas can indeed be mapped onto a story that charts modern societys fixation on human advancement against its rejection of human difference, Matj Chlupeks gripping, gleamingly produced second feature isnt as academic as all that: Ultimately a humane message movie planting flags for both womens liberation and queer rights, this Karlovy Vary competition premiere could easily resonate with festival and arthouse audiences away from home turf.
Following extensive work in TV, shorts and music videos, Chlupeks return to the big screen arrives a decade after his precocious debut feature Touchless, which unspooled in Karlovy Vary when he was a mere teenager. A youthful brashness remains in We Have Never Been Modern, even aside from the sensitive, once-taboo subject matter of Miro ifras script: Arrestingly off-kilter compositions, seasick handheld camera moves and stylized multimedia flourishes signal the films intent to break from the staid behavior of much Czech-Slovak heritage cinema, just as its protagonist Helena (leading Czech star Eliska Krenkov, from Winter Flies and Borders of Love) increasingly chafes against the patriarchal, capitalistic norms of 1930s Czechoslovakia.
The year is 1937, in fact, just before German occupation would shatter the glistening industrialized surfaces of the new democratic republic. The encroaching shadow of fascism is felt in various characters deference to vehently anti-Communist, Hitler-excusing authorities, though nobodys looking too far into the future while the gilded wheels of progress are turning in the present. The spanking-new factory town of Svit is an exemplary symbol of this economy-first thinking, built as it is around a vast viscose plant headed up by young, Brylcreem-slicked director Alois (Miloslav Knig). He is married to Helena, a bright, questioning firebrand type who has nonetheless abandoned her medical school studies to move to Svit and start a family. With their first child due imminently onscreen titles count down to her expected delivery date with a jittery air of foreboding they are the very picture of new Czech success.
So it really doesnt fit that picture when the corpse of a stillborn baby is found in the rubble at Alois factory; that the body has both male and female genitalia is a hushed-up detail that sets off feverish rumor-mongering in a small, conservative community. Eager to draw a veil over the discovery as swiftly as possible, Alois complies absolutely when secret police agents (Milan Ondrik and Marin Mita) arrive to investigate, even inviting them to stay at his and Helenas home. Their hasty official conclusion, pinning the blame on alleged Communist disruptors, doesnt wash with a skeptical Helena, who begins to do some digging of her own and is eventually led to frightened, nave factory employee Alexander (Richard Langdon), who identifies as male but has female reproductive organs.
The truth behind the tragedy unfolds against a culture of uncomprehending silence on intersex and LGBT identity, with societal gaps in knowledge filled by lurid assumptions and accusations. With her own marriage at stake in a burgeoning culture war, Helena must leading a largely unsupported fight for tolerance and enlightenment in a community where what is traditional doesnt need changing is an oft-repeated mantra. (ifras dialogue can go a little heavy on the rhetorical ironies.) Granted a few moments of stand-up-and-cheer verbal rebellion, the reliable Krenkov makes for a sternly sympathetic heroine, though the MVP here is transgender actor Langdon, restrained and achingly vulnerable as a man still at odds with his own anatomy, who wants to be accepted without becoming a cause.
Chlupeks restless, roving direction is suitably energizing for a story built around tight deadlines and impending disaster even if, between its heightened noir styling, Martin Doubas hyper-kinetic lensing and an imposing, sometimes anachronistic score by Simon Goff (a Hildur Gunadttir collaborator, and audibly so), We Have Never Been Modern risks feeling aesthetically overwrought, albeit never dull. (Helenas research into intersex biology is shown via beautiful, elaborately flowering animated interludes.) Meanwhile, the film makes a considerable virtue of a pitfall common to many such period pieces where the lovingly researched and rendered production and costume design feels entirely too box-fresh, too unworn. Here, that slightly eerie newness is, like Doubas super-saturated palette, wholly appropriate in a damning portrait of what one billboard terms a town of the future a future thatll come as a shock to its privileged, complacent architects.