Alois Nebel (2011)
Directed by: Tomáš Lunák
1989, the eve of the dismantling of the Berlin wall. In a remote part of Czechoslovakia, a desperate man tries to evade border guards, but is eventually captured. At a nearby train station lives railwayman Alois Nebel (Miroslav Krobot). Withdrawn and disconnected, he rarely speaks, and draws comfort from reading railway timetables. When Nebel seems to have a breakdown, he is sent to an asylum, which is soon shown to be part of the continuum of state repression – in another part of the institution, the captured man is being tortured. The man escapes and, a little while later, Nebel is released. He finds he no longer has a job at his station, so he makes his way to a Prague that is in the throes of change. Lost amidst the bureaucracy and confusion, and distracted by recurrent memories of his childhood at the end of the war, nearly 45 years earlier, he is on the verge of becoming a vagrant, sleeping on benches in the main train station, when he is befriended by a kindly widow.
Beyond portraying Nebel’s mental disintegration and partial recovery, the story is a critique of the active and passive cruelty of the years of Soviet domination, beginning with the expulsion of Germans at the end of the second world war (it is unusual to see Germans portrayed as other than the bad guys in any depiction of the war and its immediate aftermath).
Visually, this animated movie has much to commend it, with a cold beauty that creates an effective representation of the haunted nature of Nebel’s mind. The sound, too, is well done, and they are particularly powerful in combination at the end of the movie, as a huge storm crashes and echoes across the mountains to which Nebel has returned.
The problem – and it’s a big one – is that the film is desperately, unforgivably slow and seems to revel in a kind of catatonia when it comes to telling us what is going on. A lot of information comes out in the last few minutes, so it does eventually make some kind of sense – but by then it is too late for us to really engage with the characters, and care very deeply about their fates and histories.
