Review of Adelheid (1970) by Edgar C — 05 Mar 2014

Frantisek Vlácil's visual poetry had enough magic for him to be considered among the most poetic auteurs of classic European cinema, and Adelheid is another gem in his undervalued filmography that proves this point.

In the most loyal Antonioni tradition, and also participating in the mystical visual style that invaded European celluloid during the 70s, especially Italy and France, Vlácil uses the attrezzo, the forgotten landscapes, a predominantly intoxicating darkness, the stares and the overall body language to communicate the characters' thoughts and feelings, and also the scope of the situations. We as viewers are put in a distance proportionally to the distance that the two protagonists are put between each other given the language barrier. To add more mysteriousness to the embracing aura, the classic musical works of Bach and Strauss play predominantly in a rather peculiar manner, perhaps creating dissonance if compared to the seemingly inert spirit of the film if seen only superficially, but probably as passionate as the inner feelings that were never spoken.

And as distant from a Hollywood story as it is, the story does not get stuck in a simple love story without being capable of going beyond. On the contrary, beneath its sterile appearance are hidden layers of love, of sticking to your own principles, and of post-war conspiracies based on fundamentalist patriotic ideals. Maybe the feeling of it all is, indeed, too sterile for its own sake at particular moments, but I'd say that the audiovisual techniques employed to accentuate the story's delicacies compensate for some dead moments and threw out a correlation coefficient of 0.86.

86/100.