Czech Republic’s Oscar© 2020 Entry for Best International Feature: ‘Charlatan’ by Agnieszka Holland

Sydney Levine
SydneysBuzz The Blog
5 min readFeb 26, 2021

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Agnieszka Holland’s film Charlatan which premiered in Berlinale’s Competition in 2020, is one of her best recent movies. That might be in part due to the writer, Marek Epstein, a young Prague actor.

In Poland, a man gifted with exceptional abilities for curing people’s illnesses is set against the background of the events of three different regimes, each of which is suspicious about the protagonist’s methods.

Beginning in the 1920s, young Mikolasek establishes a lucrative practice in Bohemia, a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Ailing people line up for hours every morning in the hope of securing an appointment with the doctor who, within minutes, assesses what is ailing them and prescribes a homeopathic remedy merely by holding up a sample of the patient’s urine to the light and examining it intently. We see what he sees: Tiny particles floating around in the golden liquid, which itself varies in color and density. Once examined, he barks out his prognosis and the cure.

During his successful practice during the Nazi ruled 1930s, he acquires a handsome (and predominantly straight) male lover with whom he can momentarily “be himself”. However, in the Soviet-ruled totalitarian 1950s, the man’s iconoclastic behavior and politics become intolerable to the communist regime. He is imprisoned and put on trial on trumped-up murder charges.

Watch the trailer here.

As Todd McCarthy in Deadline says, “Despite the bluntly accusatory title, the film doesn’t remotely entertain the notion that its subject was a fraud or an imposter…

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Sydney’s 40+ years in international film business include exec positions in acquisitions, twice selling FilmFinders, the 1st film database, teaching & writing.