Olmo Omerzu steers this Czech road movie gently, teasing wonderfully natural performances from his young leads
Winter Flies’ two teen runaways, as they make a break across country in their hot-wired Audi, are prone to spontaneously
BREAKING out in incredulous laughter; that’s the guiding spirit of this unforced, inquisitive and winningly optimistic Czech road movie. There’s a hint of unspecified family troubles in their rear-view mirror, but the underage drivers – blasé loverman Mará (Tomáš Mrvík) and rotund Heduš (Jan František Uher) – are more focused on heading anywhere-but-here.
Recounted in cross-cut flashback from the
police station where Mará is being interrogated on his own (with Heduš’s fate unknown), the duo use the journey time to trade their obsessions: joining the Foreign Legion, sleeping-bag protocol, Mará’s supposed
MILITARY hotshot granddad and, of course, getting laid. These kind of semi-delusional adolescent hobbyhorses could have ended up as a Superbad-style gag-fest, but Slovenian director Olmo Omerzu patiently teases out a subtler humour and pathos. Nuzzling tightly to the actors’ perspective, Omerzu in his third feature comes close to the kind of miraculous naturalness Hirokazu Kore-eda achieves in his films.