Sadly Over-hyped

Great Film overall

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

"Protektor" is fortunately not just another Holocaust movie. Since "Schindler's List", most of other attempts to grapple with this horrible blight to humanity, fell short. Perhaps Steven Spielberg made the ultimate Holocaust movie. Director Marek Najbrt, luckily comes up with a fresh idea. His stylish film-noir, filmed beautifully, is more than anything else, a treatise on the nature of collaboration. It is easy to simplify matters and judge with the righteous indignation those who served the losing side. People do it for variety of reasons, fear, money, blackmail or the sweet arousal of power. And some, like increasingly, as movie goes, dis likable Emil, manage to convince themselves that there is no other choice. But, there always is, even if it means pain and sacrifice. Some other Emil will ardently serve similar masters in different uniforms, only few years later. Alas, that is the nature of humanity. As long as there is, a heavy boot of oppression, there will be enthusiastic servitude of shoe-shiners.

As someone who has an interest in the Nazi period of European history the movie Protektor naturally attracted my interest. I especially enjoy watching foreign films of the period to see how those(and their descendants) who actually suffered under Nazi rule have dealt with the legacy of the period.This film is unlike most films I have seen of the period in that both of the main characters are flawed--deeply flawed in fact. Emil, the husband, is an philanderer, who collaborates with the Nazis.He says that he is doing so to protect his wife, Hana, but we suspect that professional gain plays not a bit part in his motivation to broadcast the Nazis' propaganda.Hana, meanwhile, cannot refrain from engaging in provocative behavior that put both her and Emil at risk for imprisonment in a concentration camp. Hana's obliviousness to the danger of her behavior is the weakest element of this film. From having her pictures take outside and inside of places where Jews are restricted to even harboring a fellow Jew, Hana insists on brazenly flouting the Nazi's regulations. One can sympathize with her to an certain extent, but it does make one wonder about her mental state. Surely no one who has Jewish would be so foolhardy to risk antagonizing the Nazis--especially so after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. The Nazi response to Heydrich's killing was extremely brutal. The town of Lidice was leveled and all the males over the age of 16.(males 16 and over were also massacred in the town of Lezaky as well as all of their females)At least 1300 people were murdered in the aftermath of the brutal response to Heydrich's killing. In view of this, Hana's actions indicate an almost pathological desire to be arrested and deported. In having said all that, I do appreciate the efforts of the filmmakers to display the complexity of behind the decisions people made to collaborate with the Nazis. The Nazis gave people only two choices: submit or you or someone you love, will be subject to arrest, torture, and death. This of course does not excuse their actions nor is it a blanket explanation for all who collaborated. Many did so for financial and/ideological reasons. But it does offer a different view from the normal depictions of collaborators we see in film.My number one complaint with the film is that it never explores why Hana is behaving in the manner that she is behaving. While we all can appreciate the resentment at being excluded from society, Hana was not the only Jew to have suffer from oppression in Prague. Why was her reaction so different from the rest of Prague's Jews? Her actions throughout the film are never explained and for a person like me who is familiar with the Nazis and the Holocaust, her brazen behavior strikes me as unbelievable.

Protektor (2009) is a Czech film, directed by Marek Najbrt and shown in the United States as "Protector." (The title refers to Reinhard Heydrich, who was a high-ranking German Nazi official. He was Deputy Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia.)Marek Daniel plays Emil Vrbata, a Czech journalist and radio announcer, who has no Nazi sympathies. However, Marek takes on the role of media spokesperson in order to protect his wife, Hana, who is Jewish. (Hana is played by the lovely Jana Plodková .) Hana is given papers that will allow her to escape Czechoslovakia, but she disdains them. She, like so many others, cannot believe that the European powers will accept Hitler's demand for the Czech Sudetenland in order to prevent war. However, as we know, that's exactly what happened, and eventually Germany occupied all of Czechoslovakia, and began the ruthless persecution of Jews and of all opponents to the Third Reich.Everyone has a limit beyond which he or she will not be pushed, but who knows where that limit is? Both of the protagonists in the film are selfish, reckless, and immature. That behavior may have been acceptable--or at least not lethal--in prewar Czechoslovakia. However, once the Nazis took over, it was just a matter of time before people had to change or be destroyed.Someone pointed out that neither Emil nor Hana are particularly praiseworthy individuals, and that's true. However, as I see it, that's the point of the movie. We have all seen movies about heroes and martyrs. This is a movie about flawed people who find themselves in a horrendous situation. How they deal with this situation is at the crux of the film.We saw this movie at the very praiseworthy Rochester Jewish Film Festival. It will also work well on DVD. It's not a great film, but it's definitely worth finding and seeing.

It's 1938 and the Nazis are just one step away from invading and occupying Czechoslovakia. Hana is a young Czech film actress who also happens to be Jewish. She's just appeared in her first feature with her leading man, an older Jewish actor, who warns her that her career is over and that their picture will never see the light of day since the Nazis will never allow its release. He hands her a forged passport and papers to get out of the country but she throws them in the trash, not believing what he says about the imminent German invasion one bit.As the filming of the 'film within a film' is on the verge of completion, we see the two actors riding stationery bicycles with a moving image in the background. As was the usual practice in creating films in earlier days, the illusion of motion is created when the moving image flickers in the background but the object in the foreground is static. Thus, the bicyclist becomes a symbol for the man who pedals furiously but is actually going nowhere. That man is the Czech everyman of 1938 who desperately wishes to escape his tragic circumstances but in reality remains motionless, trapped by the forces of tyranny. Throughout the film, we catch glimpses of the film's protagonist, Emil, pedaling furiously, superimposed over the screen's larger canvas.Hana is married to Emil, a journalist, who is conscripted by collaborating Czech officials, to serve as a radio announcer for the occupying German forces. A colleague at the radio station, Franta, won't keep quiet and he's taken away presumably by the Gestapo and later executed. Emil, no hard core collaborator, chooses to accept the job working as the mouthpiece for the Nazis in order to save his wife from being deported to the death camps. Emil's boss at the radio station is a Nazi sympathizer who offers him the job with the agreement that no one will bother him about his wife as long as she remains holed up in their apartment.Soon, Emil has become popular hosting a cultural program in Prague entitled, "Voices of Our Home". Meanwhile Hana becomes bored sitting at home and jeopardizes Emil's position by leaving their apartment, usually attending the cinema. Hana is not depicted as one who is to be pitied—rather, she's a narcissist who refuses to accept her position as a Jew in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia as well as living under the illusion that she's someone important--the up-and-coming film star that she used to be.Emil begins having an affair with a former colleague at the station who is now engaged to his boss. Meanwhile Hana starts hanging out with a former medical student and now a morphine-addicted projectionist. He wants to go to bed with her but she resists his advances, eventually allowing him, however, to take pictures of her in the nude. At this point in the film, things slow down considerably since Hana is no longer talking to Emil with the conflict between the two principals, grinding to a halt.The plot picks up when Hana's former co-star shows up at their apartment having just escaped from a death transport (it's revealed that his forged papers were discovered and he never made it out of Czechoslovakia). Emil is horrified that Hana allows him to take a bath in the apartment and throws him out on the street. Enraged at Emil for throwing her ex-colleague out, Hana dons her blond wig and adopts the persona of her character from her movie and crashes Emil's boss's wedding. Emil is on the verge of being fired for his 'transgression' when Reich Protector Heydrich is murdered by Czech partisans. Nazi soldiers do a house to house search and discover Hana is in the apartment. When they realize who Emil is, they take no action against Hana, despite the fact that the soldiers know she's Jewish. Later the Nazis broadcast a description of a bicycle used by one of the partisans who's killed Heydrich. Emil has another affair with a ditsy gossip columnist and takes her family's bicycle back to his apartment and attempts to hide it; this leads Hana to believe that Emil has switched sides and is now helping the partisans.Now Emil's boss orders him to prove his loyalty by reading a loyalty oath over the airwaves after the Heydrich assassination places all Czech citizens in jeopardy. Meanwhile, Hana has come down to earth after she escapes arrest during the house-to-house search. She packs her belongings and turns herself into the authorities. Emil decides not to show up at the broadcast to read the loyalty oath and goes looking for Hana.In the final scene, Emil finds her in a crowd of Jews being marched to the death transports; as he stands impassively, preventing the group from marching forward, Nazi soldiers club him in the head, pushing him off to the side of the road.Why does Emil choose to stop collaborating and not read the loyalty oath as he promised his hard core Nazi boss? The way I interpret it is that despite being estranged from his wife he still was devoted to protecting her (perhaps deep down he still loved her). Now with his wife gone, he feels that his career is no longer important and no longer sees any point in helping his oppressors.'Protector' does a fine job of depicting how the Czechs coped with the Nazi occupation of their country during World War II. The filmmakers do not seek to judge those who collaborated; their view is only 'this is how it happened'. The film ably draws a distinction between those who enthusiastically collaborated (as in the case of Emil's boss) and Emil himself, who was much more of a reluctant collaborator (always placing himself in jeopardy in an effort to protect his Jewish wife). "Protector" is a welcome addition to the pantheon of Holocaust-themed films.