Krotka Fortunately, I found a rare film by a little-known Czechoslovak director. Interestingly, Wikipedia reports only eight screen versions of the story of the same name by Fyodor Dostoevsky, but there is not a word about Stanislav Barabash’s “Meek”. And yet it's a curious tape. And if Robert Bresson changed the “Meek” F. Dostoevsky, transferring, among other things, the action to Paris of the late 60s of the XX century. Barabash decided to make the film as close as possible to the original, without changing either the scene or the names of the characters (even the store signs here in Russian). In the film, as well as in the book, Meek is a very young girl (", meanwhile, she was already three months short of sixteen). I must say, quite successfully for the role of Mod Barabash chose then 21-year-old unusually attractive actress Magda Vashariova, shortly before that already played in the film masterpiece Frantisek Vlachila “Market Lazarov”.
In the picture, the actress is different - homely, kind, proud, willful and sexy. In the film, you can see stunning close-ups (the most talented work of the cameraman Stanislav Somolanya) and emotional scenes of the struggle of the heroine, who does not want to share a bed with her legal husband, who is much older than her. And now he's in a room next to the corpse of his young wife, hours before she committed suicide. Well, the viewer has the opportunity to listen to the confession of her husband, who painfully suffers loss, and at the same time tries to understand what happened (" ... I tortured her - that's what!). Building the narrative as confused memories of the hero at the corpse of his wife, the scene of her suicide, differently shown in the beginning and in the finale of the film, rings this one in all respects undeservedly forgotten ribbon of Barabash.