Tenderness: The Past is a Foreign Country in Martin Šulík’s (1991) Debut (Review)

Released in 1991, Tenderness (or Neha as it is known in its native Slovak) is director Martin Šulík’s debut full-length feature, one which proved to be a groundbreaking production for post-Communist Slovakia. The film tells the story of Simon, a solitary young student played by Géza Benkõ, and commences with him leaving the family home he occupied with his parents, following an unspecified falling out with his father. Cast adrift into the big wide world of adulthood and independence, Simon becomes drawn into a peculiar relationship with an older couple, Mária and Viktor, played by Maria Pakulnis and György Cserhalmi. As this triangular relationship develops, the dynamics become increasingly erratic and unpredictable; often veering between passion and cruelty and leaving Simon to second guess both the couple, their mysterious past that may hold the key to understanding their relationship and ultimately the world around him too.

Following the success of his 1989 short film, Hura (which is included as an extra on this Blu-ray release from Second Run) Šulík set his sights on making his feature debut and approached screenwriter Ondrej Šulaj with a screenplay he had been working on. Advised that his script was unworkable, the pair set out to produce – along with cast and crew – the collective effort that ultimately became Tenderness. Ostensibly a coming of age tale, the film deploys this relatively standard, universal film genre as a metaphor for Slovakia itself as it emerged blinking into the light from Communist oppression. Using the backdrop of regime change and the anxiety of an uncertain future, the film analyses the basic values, sense of morality and the complexity of human relationships at the dawn of a new age that is still intrinsically affected by the corruption of what has gone before. In the character of Simon, a mature continuation of the guileless protagonist of Slovak cinema, the film has a representation of the future that lay ahead. In the very first scene, Simon is shown to disown and abandon the life that he once had, the life that his parents – the previous generation – represents.

The argument which determines this bid for freedom is curiously one that he has no real memory of, his mother having to tell him that his father is no longer speaking to him because he “beat his father up”. This in some way echoes the totalitarian principle of ‘normalisation’; the twenty or so year period between the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and the glasnost era of the late 1980s which saw a seizure of power by politicians such as Gustáv Husák, loyal to the Soviet cause. It was an era in which the ‘mistakes’ of Alexander Dubček’s ‘Socialism with a Human Face’ were to be corrected and effectively disappeared, forgotten from collective history. as Western influences and the revolutionary fervour of the 1960s was subsequently purged from the country as a whole. Those who resisted were ostracized, whilst conformity was achieved through both limited movement and a compliant state-controlled media which espoused the benefits of Communist living, often through hidden ideological codes and messages.

This then was the film industry that creatives such as Šulík and Šulaj came of age in. Filmmakers were expected to present a false image of life under Communism that undeniably bore no relation to audiences whose memories recalled the persecution inflicted by their Soviet-controlled masters. As a result, Slovakian films during ‘normalisation’ were well versed in using metaphor to speak the truth, to tip the wink to audiences who knew that Communism was not the utopia the authorities wished them to believe and that a better life was indeed possible.

Whilst a greater degree of political freedom was available to Šulík, Tenderness still employs the traditional use of metaphor within Slovak cinema. Whilst most Western cinema will explore a protagonist’s apprehension, difficulty and eventual assimilation into the ‘grown-up world’ in their coming of age dramas, Tenderness explores this major development whilst in a vacuum of unknowable social and political realities. This metaphorical approach is complemented by an almost abstract structure that pays great importance to the visual aesthetic, more so than dialogue. In this, we can see how Šulík as a director is influenced by filmmakers such as Tarkovsky, Bergman and Bresson. The cinematography of Martin Strba is very striking, betraying his roots as a photographer documenting the realities of Czechoslovakia, whilst Šulík affords his audience the chance to decompress from his imagery; closing scenes with a fade to black that is accompanied by Vladimír Godár’s string score before the music itself fades and the audience is greeted with ten seconds of contemplative silence in the dark.

Metaphor is also evident in the film’s decision to play with Biblical symbolism. It’s important to remember that, under Communism, religion was heavily suppressed and indeed Šulík brings his own experiences here to bear, in that his own father had to effectively hide his faith during this time. It’s telling that religious belief and the purity of miracles is something that the film seems to fondly accept as an ideal (and much can be made of the decision to name the central female protagonist Maria) something that the world, or at the very least the film’s three central characters, must return to if they are to achieve a satisfying, contented future. The past, which Simon will ultimately piece together as a means to understanding Maria and Viktor’s relationship across the course of the film, is something that is impure and corrupted; the root of their present unhappiness. That it is a film, a home movie of Viktor’s, that eventually gives Simon this discovery is an interesting choice as the nature of the cinematic medium during normalisation was undoubtedly built on a falsehood. In the film’s last scene, one of surprising optimism and genuine beauty, it is ruefully remarked that such beauty cannot be captured on camera – perhaps in much the same way that the reality of Slovak life could not until this point either.

Thanks for reading our review of Tenderness (Neha)

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