The Czech Republic's contender for Best Foreign Film is a dark and personal look at the country's occupation by Nazi Germany. Eschewing Hollywood's black and white approach, Protector delves into the murky and uncomfortable topic of collaboration.
The film centers around the couple Emil and Hana. Emil is a radio producer later reporter for the Czechoslovak National Radio. The film opens with Hana, bedraggled and rag doll thin, locked in the pantry and Emil coming to let her out. We have to jump back a few years to see how history and circumstance have brought the couple to this.
Years before Emil and Hana were the very ideal of middle class splendor from the first republic era. Emil is still a radio producer and Hana is an aspiring movie stat who is working on a film called “When I Shut my Eyes” (Když zavøu oèi.), a thirties style musical romance. The title takes on a bitter irony when soon after Nazi Germany gets to work carving up its eastern neighbor. First the Munich Pact in September 1938 handed the bordering Sudetenland areas, predominantly inhabited by German speakers, over to Hitler. In March the following year, Germany invaded the rest of the country. Slovakia split away and became an independent country until 1945. What is today called the Czech Republic became the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. As a Jewish woman, Hana has more to fear from this regime than her compatriots.
The name of Hana's movie comes to encapsulate the reaction of many people in the occupied country. They shut their eyes and either coped or prospered. One person who did exactly the latter is Hana's husband Emil. When a more idealistic colleague refuses to act as a mouth piece for the Nazis, Emil takes his place because his German boss knows Hana is Jewish, and Emil thinks complying is the only way to protect her. However, he soon becomes a star, all the while his wife's freedoms are becoming more and more curtailed.
The two characters come to represent the two aspects of the many facts the Czech nation during this period, and having them married places those sides of co-operation and oppression in uncomfortable proximity. It also means that much of the story turns on their relationship. Consequently, a lot of the tension is also personal. When the clashes come, it is as much over relationship problems, such as Emil's infidelity, more than moral ones (collaboration). It is not that Hana accepts the moral price for her survival. Rather her domestic life is all she has, and even the unhappiness is more normal than the nightmare of the regime.
Unsurprisingly, Hana yearns for the comfort of her past life. She ignores the order, banning Jewish people from visiting the cinema. This is only the beginning of her defiance. The projectionist becomes enamoured with her, and starts to take photos of her, done up in her movie star glamour, beside signs forbidding her entry into restaurants and other places. She even steals one of the signs and hangs it on the door to a transport holding compound, telling the victims they cannot enter. With him, Hana starts to dabble in morphine use, which becomes another way for her to cope.
It's hard to know what to make of Hana's actions. From a historical point of view, it's fair to assume that she wasn't aware what happened to the people. As surprising as it is for us today, many victims were unaware they were being led to their death. However, we do know, so this act has a bitterness. If it says anything, it says only hindsight can allow people to conceive the enormity of these crimes.
Hana's stand does not last forever. She cannot bring back the past. Her co-star in the film “When I Shut my Eyes” turns up at her place having fled a transport. He is also Jewish but unlike Hana he has had no one to protect him. He is gaunt and filthy and Hana hardly recognizes him when he appears at her door. He eventually asks Hana to let him have a bath. Emil doesn't take kindly to this and throws him out of the flat. On one level it is spiteful and jealous. On another, there's a sense, he's doing this so he can protect Hana.
All the while, Emil's success with radio station reaches such a level that he himself becomes the subject of the news. A young journalist who was sent to interview him becomes his lover, and it's from this moment, the false sense of security Emil lulled himself into comes apart. Waking in the journalist's bed, he realizes he's late for a meeting with his boss. An unlocked bicycle outside the journalist's flat is a speedy and too tempting a means to get him to the station. Emil again succumbs to the easy option. Unfortunately, the bicycle resembles one, which the authorities are searching for in connection to the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. In his desperation he tries to hide the incriminating evidence. Later, the journalist reveals to Hana that Emil had taken the bike from her flat after spending the night there.
Embittered by the news, Hana, doped on morphine, goes to the compound where she had once daringly hung the sign. Emil arrives only to see her leaving. He is pushed to the side by soldiers and Hana marches on, becoming obscured by the many other people are also being sent to their death.
Protector succeeds as a film and as a subject matter by keeping the focus on the characters. At the beginning I said that Hana and Emil represent the two perspectives of the Czech experience. They are also a wife and a husband, who had to contend with each other in extraordinary circumstances and ultimately two people trying to struggle with an evil bigger than they or anyone in their time could imagine.
