Dan (Ondrej Vetchý) and Bóza (Jirí Schmitzer) are brothers - but
even though they share the same room at their mother's place, they
couldn't be more different: Bóza, the older of the two, is level-headed,
rather serious, and also a bit on the boring side, while Dan is out-going,
fun-loving, and a hit with the ladies, so much so that he occasionally
even shags girls at his workplace. The two compete over everything, from
the attention of their mother to the friendship of workmates (they both
work at the same printing plant) to whatever else there is. Then pretty
young Magda (Ivana Velichová) starts working at the printing plant, and
Bóza takes an instant liking in her, and she responds to him accordingly,
and if he wasn't so buttoned up, they could even become a couple. However,
when Dan notices the blossoming affair between his brother and Magda, he
uses all of his charm to seduce her - and though she's reluctant at first,
he eventually succeeds and impregnates her ... Dan of course doesn't
want to know anything about the baby, but Bóza still cares for Magda
despite everything, and eventually they marry, and Bóza brings up his
brother's baby as his and even has another baby with Magda. After years,
Dan finally pays a visit to his brother, but he can't quit an old habit,
and before you know it he seduces Magda again, when she is supposed to
look after the children, and when Bóza comes running hearing his daughter
cry, he is run over by a truck and dies. The accident quite simply is
too much for Dan: He totally loses his coolness, loses his charms, becomes
annoying where he once was entertaining, drinks way too much, and he
repeatedly loses his temper to a point where he crashes the office of a
superior. And Magda, whom he had once managed to seduce without a problem,
now won't even talk to him anymore. In the end, Dan becomes totally
lost, seeing his brother's ghost in the streets, but also the ghost of his
former self. Moving drama that uses the rather depressing
backdrop of socialist architecture, furniture and fashion to its
advantage, that manages to tell what's essentially a morality play without
hammering the message home, and that really seems to care about its
characters without labelling them good and bad guys. Pretty good,
actually.
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