But with the front line drawing closer, and Hans’s head is in her lap, she does not kill him. We had gone most of the film on the side of the underdog, hoping that Krista would escape and perhaps even take revenge for enduring the war and losing her husband hours earlier. Then, things take a sharp turn, and the film ends in a stunning obliteration of sympathy. Will she or won’t she use the weapons on the Germans? Will they or won’t they discover what she is doing? But despite the almost ethereal audiovisual atmosphere, we can feel the tension building. Krista spends the first half of the film in silent contemplation, and it is riveting to behold.
Over time, we come to realise that the trees themselves are, in a way, the organ pipes, and we find ourselves in a sacred space where good and evil have come to do battle. These moments are elegantly brought to our attention when the carriage moves on and the camera stays behind to discreetly reveal the items discarded in the bushes.īeautiful organ music played by Milan Šlechta suffuses the soundtrack as we watch the trees stretching up to the heavens contrast starkly with the fog in black and white. Slowly but surely, as the second soldier, Günther, loses consciousness and Hans is easily distracted, Krista disposes of the weapons one by one. We are constantly aware of the various weapons on board: The Germans have rifles and a pistol, but Krista has an axe concealed underneath the carriage. In post-war Czechoslovak cinema, this was a big shift from the previous representations of German soldiers as uniformly malevolent. And although he had been in the service of far-right fascism, he is clearly also human. Unlike Krista, whose life is in immediate danger, he is high-strung to the point of nearly snapping in half. It has to be said that Hans is portrayed as far more naïve than malicious. He shows her photos of his family and his home in Vienna. Or because this quiet and mysterious but seemingly submissive girl is taking him to freedom. Perhaps it is because the war is at an end and he has survived the ordeal. By contrast, Hans (Jaromír Hanzlík), the young German soldier sitting beside her on the carriage, is positively giddy. Thus begins a daylong horse-drawn carriage ride through the misty forest.
They say they are Austrian, not “Reichsdeutschen”, although in wartime this is a distinction without a difference. A few hours later, as day is breaking, two soldiers (one of them suffering serious injuries) appear on her doorstep and force her to take them to the border. It’s the first week of Mary 1945, and we can reasonably assume it was Germans who did the killing. The opening crawl informs us that an anonymous “they” had hanged Krista’s husband the previous night for stealing a few sacks of cement. Set in the forests of Moravia, close to the Czechoslovakia–Austria border, the story covers roughly 24 tumultuous hours in the life of a young widow named Krista (an enigmatic, quietly brooding Iva Janžurová).
#Battle of vienna movie movie
With gorgeous photography and a soundtrack that has religious undertones, Carriage to Vienna reminds us that the terror of the Reich’s occupiers spilled over into horrors committed by the previously occupied Czechs.Ī road movie unlike any other, Karel Kachyňa’s Carriage to Vienna is also a thriller and an absolutely devastating indictment of the Czech nation after the Second World War.
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