No Regrets

The film "Ničeho nelituji" (I don’t regret anything) was made by combining two independent films - an older document Standard and a new film (I don’t regret anything). The combined document is supposed to capture family life in the Czech Republic at the end of the millennium, to penetrate the structure of family relations and their transformations, to record the tension between generations, to create an imprint of the lifestyle change. Using the well-known intimate field of a family as a foundation, the director captures the familiar situations; the fixed roles in the family and the tension of unfilled relationships lead to conflicts of banal incidents with tragic and even grotesque repercussions.

The first part captures lives of three women - a forlorn grandmother, her divorced daughter and granddaughter, who is getting married. After a long time, they travel back to Český ráj, a part of Bohemia where they used to live together for some time. However, an unexpected outburst of family injustices takes place during the trip. In the film’s second part, we are introduced to a woman from a suburb of the city of Zlín. Her sincerity allows a detailed depiction of relationships in her family. The tirade starts with her two sons and their wives as well as the woman’s present partner. Once more, the director narrates through the tension inside relationships. However, in comparison with the first part, there’s more room left for irony and comicality: a crisis of people who met and are still together cannot be as intense as a misunderstanding between relatives.

In both parts, the camera gradually ceases to be an unwelcome witness, people lose their embarrassment. The crew was bestowed with such trust that they even become involved in the arguments, they are considered a kind of an arbiter, at other times the camera becomes a family friend gives a chance to show off. In I don’t regret anything, the director once more applies the methods she used in Standard, sofas in living rooms are a common prop for psychoanalysis, family reunions call for conflicts from which there is no escaping, the coherence of the two parts is perfected with the final dancing scenes.

It is as if the families in this double feature, and all our families, carried in similar communication loops the heritage of identical conflicts, too loud misunderstandings.