Movie review: ‘Kawasaki’s Rose’

“Kawasaki’s Rose” is about secrets and lies, about truths that have been hidden, then revealed, then hidden again. This intricate, powerful, unsettling film brings us into a world of profound moral complexities where facile judgments must be suspended because even the best people can become complicit in evil.

Directed by the veteran Czech team of director Jan Hrebejk and writer Petr Jarchovsky (responsible for the superb Oscar-nominated “Divided We Fall”), “Kawasaki’s Rose” peels away layers to reveal even deeper ones. It’s a film rich in psychological and political currents, sunken pools and treacherous eddies that can trap the unwary.

A beautifully crafted 10th collaboration between writer and director, “Kawasaki’s Rose” takes place in the present-day Czech Republic, but it’s intensely involved with the difficulty of discovering the truth about the country’s Communist past. Reminiscent of Germany’s “The Lives of Others,” it is, the filmmakers say, the first work from their country to deal with the still-incendiary subject of cooperation with the formerly all-powerful secret police.

Avoiding anything obvious, even in its opening, the film begins in an unnamed city and country with brief glimpses of two men (one of whom turns out to be Kawasaki), individuals whose importance and full identifies aren’t revealed until much later. Then the scene swiftly shifts to Prague, where we’re thrown into the middle of a complex multi-generational family drama, starting with the filming of a television documentary that quickly fills us in on essential back story.

The subject of the documentary is Pavel Josek (Martin Huba), a professor of psychology and a dean of the medical school at Charles University. He’s being filmed because, as an eminent dissident who stood up to the totalitarian Communist regime, he’s scheduled to receive the prestigious Memory of the Nation award.

Soft-spoken, thoughtful, humane, Pavel is the kind of person his award would indicate. He looks on quietly as his more forceful wife, Jana (Daniela Kolarova), a fellow dissident, talks about why they took the risks they did, about the necessity of doing what was right. Their only current worry appears to be the health of their adult daughter, Lucie (Lenka Vlasakova), hospitalized with a mysterious ailment.

Not happy about any of this, or much of anything else for that matter, is Lucie’s husband, Ludek (Milan Mikulcik), the sound engineer on that television documentary. Not without his own flaws, including bad relations with his daughter, Bara (Anna Simonova), and his mistress, Radka (Petra Hrebickova), he seethes with resentment toward his in-laws.

Though he’s a born grievance collector who mockingly calls his father-in-law a “paragon of virtue,” Ludek has a point. In fact, his in-laws, especially his mother-in-law, are disappointed in him: For Jana, boring people are “worse than murderers.”

Just as Ludek’s personal affairs are coming to a head, the documentary crew comes into possession of Pavel’s unedited, previously unseen secret police file, which indicates that he may not be who everyone thinks he is politically and that a kind of cover-up may have taken place.

It’s now that “Kawasaki’s Rose” really kicks into gear. We are immediately introduced to one of the film’s most troubling characters, a retired master Communist interrogator named Kafka (Ladislav Chudik). Chilling, unapologetic and sure of himself, the now elderly Kafka still personifies the former power of the Communist state in a way that unnerves everyone.

This news about Pavel affects all parties differently — mother Jana and daughter Lucie have a confrontation that is shocking in its intensity — and everyone has a different version of just how much of the revelation is actually true and what that truth might mean.

By presenting a world where nothing is clean and simple, where all are complicit, “Kawasaki’s Rose” cautions us not to feel superior, not to be sure what we ourselves would have done in similar situations. The film details how the pressures an all-knowing, all-invasive government was capable of putting on people could turn them so inside out it became almost impossible to know what the right thing was, let alone do it. “There is a well full of blood,” one character memorably says, quoting a poem. “And everyone has drunk of it.”

But though it believes strongly in remembering the past (“If memory is lost,” one character says, “we cease to exist”), the point “Kawasaki’s Rose” finally wants to make is that what matters most is renewal and reconciliation, the human ability to start again. It’s an especially resonant conclusion for a particularly compelling and significant film.

kenneth.turan@latimes.com