Marbles

The prologue of this collection of film stories sees children acting out their parts at a wedding: "newly-wed” Julinka won’t let her little "husband” Péťa go off and play with the other children. Three tales follow: teenager Angela fights a battle with her mother’s lover (the tale "Mother’s Angel”); the heroine of the story "Moral Imperative” solicits the freedom and respectability of a young priest; and in "Funeral” Boženka tyrannises her old, sick husband with her excessive anxiety, until she drives him literally "beyond the grave”. Debuting director Olga Dabrowská, who also wrote the script for her film, treats the theme of men manipulated by women. Signs of female egotism and hedonistic indulgence already appear in their childhood relationships and remain with them up until old age and death. In her paradoxical stories of women of all ages and backgrounds, the filmmaker demonstrates the mechanisms of human lives which can be frittered away with the abuse of such "incontrovertible” female weapons as tears, sex, emotional blackmail or self-sacrifice.