What works for this film has critics and viewers losing track of what doesn't. I agree with all the praise heaped on for the cinematography. As a work of visual art, this film certainly deserves its place in the list of the greatest. For that alone, I stayed with it far beyond the point of giving up on knowing who was who and what was happening to them. But, for an almost three hour movie, I need something to grasp other than great visual stimulation because that can't sustain my interest for three hours alone without some sort of tangible idea or story. There is a story here, somewhere, but unfortunately, since so many of the characters look alike, and the editing makes it impossible to tell whether you're seeing flashbacks or just moving to new scenes, and the dialog offers no help in delineating the plot, I could only tell that some medieval people were trying to kill each other--something about a robbery, but then the robber seems to have caught another robber robbing the same people and took him hostage, other people got away and were taken hostage, who I couldn't figure out, someone's daughter is a nun, maybe, or a pagan witch, or some convoluted excuse to show her naked--in other words, the story is an absolute mess. Others have praised what they call a "non-linear plot." I don't mind a non-linear plot at all, but for this film, the phrase is no better than an excuse for bad story-telling.
Review of Marketa Lazarová
