Composer:
Tadeáš VěrčákCast:
Lída Baarová (a.f.), Lída Baarová, Helena Třeštíková, Alena Šislerová (narrator), Vladimír Borský (a.f.), Gustav Fröhlich (a.f.), Joseph Goebbels (a.f.) (more)Plots(1)
Lída Baarová: an actress whose beauty was her greatest gift as well as her curse. As a young, attractive girl she quickly became the leading Czechoslovak movie star and was able to captivate the most feared men of her era. But her affair with the Minister of Propaganda of the Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels, transformed her into an enemy of her own country and a symbol of collaboration. Documentary filmmaker Helena Třeštíková met with Lída Baarová during the actress' exile abroad and filmed Lída's open confession in the final years of her life, using unique material from several European film archives and excerpts from this once beloved, later reviled actress' most famous film roles. This self-destructive love story, as monumental as an ancient Greek tragedy, is fatally linked to European history and provides an exceptionally honest portrait of a woman who had the world at her feet at the height of her career – which made her subsequent fall into oblivion and loneliness all the more staggering. (Aerofilms)
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Reviews (5)
In the Czech film scene, 2016 is undoubtedly the year of Lída Baarová, a First Republic actress whose controversial life is crying out to be retold on the big screen. While Filip Renč's lavish film attempts to convey the glamour and misery of this diva's life in a worldly manner and with a big budget, Helena Třeštíková takes an intimate look at Baarová as a person who had her good times and bad, and portrays her own version of the life of a beautiful actress who once had every man eating from her hand. We get to see almost everything from the very beginning, through the star's rise and steep fall, to an old Baarová reminiscing, cigarette and wine in hand, about Hitler, Goebbels, her family, work colleagues, etc. In short, a well-made documentary about the fate of a woman who was both loved and hated, or we love what we lose.
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It’s great when a documentary isn’t prejudiced and shows you both the good and the bad sides of people. At the same time, it doesn’t lean towards one opinion or the other and lets the viewer decide what they think about Lída Baarová. Well, this one failed to do so. Lída Baarová was surely very talented, but also very inconsiderate to others. However, when she would talk about the time she’d met Goebbles or Hitler and even dared to oppose them, I was on pins and needles and I ate up her every word. I don’t mean to hold anything against her. She didn’t have an easy life, but she might have played into those cards with her own naivety. And as she said herself, she’s had her fair share of fun and happiness. But life is not a bed of roses and every bad experience teaches us something and makes us stronger. By the end of the documentary, I wasn’t quite sure whether she’d handled everything blamelessly. I wouldn’t say so.
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In this film, you won't find the truth, just like you won't find it in the fictional portrayal of her life. There are facts presented through archival footage, but it's primarily Lída's own words that are presented here by herself. Can the actress be trusted? This is also something that comes to mind. Yet you don't get the sense from the ending that she's happy with her performance, the reconciliation is almost painful.
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"We love what we lose..." A very sad documentary that benefits mainly from the fact that it is narrated by Lída Baarová herself. But it is both a positive (for example, when the old lonely lady, who once had the whole world at her feet, talks about Goebbels and Hitler with a cigarette and how much fun the former was) and a negative (the film often asks the narrator to intervene and explain things - for example, the death of Zorka Janů). I knew only the rough outlines of the story of Lída Baarová and I was curious what new things I would learn from Doomed Beauty. But unfortunately there wasn't much. I was most impressed by the spots from newsreels - actors like Korbelář, Marván, Černý, Vítová, Gollová and of course Baarová making bags, an ode to ruined film strips that become nail polish or shoe polish... That was downright disgusting.
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In vain I ask myself who Lída Baarová - Doomed Beauty is for. If the viewer has taken part in the Baarová phenomenon, he suffers. If he hasn't, he becomes an uncomprehending laughing beast. Třeštíková's factual inaccuracies are striking (Wanka or Kopecký, Lamač or Slavínský, her team obviously doesn't care). The imbalance of reported facts is extreme (not only was Goebbels married, but so was Fröhlich). What is missing is a reflection on Baarová's career before her international success, and her work alongside other domestic stars (when Nový is shown, where is Haas?). Was it necessary to use Eva Braun's private archive in the context of Baarová? Important milestones are swept under the carpet (the tragedy of her family sounds like a farce), her career in Spain is not mentioned at all, and I could go on for a very long time. If she’s a Doomed Beauty, where is the transformation of the actress in Prague and Berlin? Where are the differences in the styles of work in Austria, Italy, and Spain shown before and after the war? I am exhausted because this is really not the result of a work that could and should have taken a good twenty years.
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