Résumés(1)
Jazz singer František (Laďa Kerndl), who has made his living as a musician on transatlantic cruisers, has recently been surrounded by frustration. His former fame (and money) is gone. He is losing his voice and wife. His daughter Helen (Tatiana Vilhelmová) left him long ago. She preferred to leave for the distant Romanian region of Banat and to teach the local Czech minority children Czech than to listen to the endless quarrels at home. (texte officiel du distributeur)
(plus)Critiques (1)
Or Laďa Kerndl’s trip to Banat in Romania. In terms of its aesthetics and content, St. Helen’s Island fits perfectly with the tabloid portraits of celebrities (or rather those who would like to be famous for a moment longer), but a more precise genre classification isn’t so simple and probably even its creators are not sure about that. For a psychological drama, it is a shamefully simple work – the protagonist does not undergo any change and, at the end, he seems just as incapable of living without his personal chef and laundress as he did at the beginning. As a special episode of a TV travel show, which the middle part of the film closely resembles, it is incredibly drawn out, as if – in the interest of Czech-Romanian friendship – its creators did not want to cut out a single shot of the landscape or a single deep truth uttered by a village elder. This programme filler is tolerable thanks to its length, endearingly lousy scenes such as Kerndl versus the pizza with ketchup and the thrilling anticipation of Vilhelmová finally appearing as promised by the credits. 30%
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