The Last Aristocrat

I find this movie kind of unfinished. On one hand it is a nice leisure-time comedy with beautiful shots of Czech castles’ exteriors and interiors. On the other the humor is kind of superficial and surprisingly quite simple in a way of all those mainstream Czech comedy series. Still it has its originality in its premise based on the book written by Mr. Boček, and therefore it makes its humor more bearable. What surprises me is that the father portrayed by Hynek Čermák had so little space to show off his stress caused by the lack of money. For example in his case it could have been a lot funnier as it is in the book. The only characters whose potential was used to their fullest were Eliška Balzerová portraying the castle cook and Martin Pechlát portraying the castle keeper. If all the characters were as great as these two it would make this comedy really brilliant. As it is now it is just nice and it wouldn’t become legendary as the book did. (02/08/2020)

The current aristocratic book series by Evžen Boček has gradually grown into a pentalogy, with each individual volume slowly but surely becoming a bestseller. It would therefore be rather surprising if no film transcript was made of it. So how good is the final film, you ask? It's not as disastrous of a Vejdělek film as others. However, the cast is not overly suited to current tastes. And it would not, of course, tolerate authentic Americans playing Americans. In any case, something pleasantly Christmassy was created, and in these early days, even a mediocre film is actually happy news. Think of such experiments as Little Baby Jesus. (16/01/2021)

I'm afraid that as long as Jiří Vejdělek writes his own scripts, he probably won't make a good comedy. The Last Aristocrat is just another spasmodic attempt to be funny, nothing more. The excellent book has lost its greatest trump card on the way to the screen, i.e. the narrator Maria, and much that beautiful verbal humor; the plot often makes no sense at all, and the sometimes good actors here are simply terrible because that's what they were obviously asked to do, and all of them are severely upstaged by the young Yvona Stolařová, and she's not even trying. If I ever laughed, it was always thanks to Pavel Liška – not his useless character, but really him, the actor Pavel Liška, who clearly understands humor better than Jiří Vejdělek. (14/11/2019)

Poslední aristokratka (« La dernière aristocrate ») est un navet kitsch et simpliste caractérisé surtout par des scènes dans lesquelles quelqu’un dit quelque chose, après quoi on a généralement droit à une longue pause pour avoir le temps d’intégrer et d’exploser de rire. Le problème, c’est qu’il y a peut-être une blague sur cinquante qui fait plus ou moins mouche. Et avec une durée frôlant les deux heures, il faut vraiment être maso pour rester jusqu’au bout ! (02/01/2021)

Je suis tout à fait conscient que transposer un livre en film est toujours une discipline extrêmement difficile. On ne peut jamais plaire à tous les lecteurs et lectrices, sans parler des fans inconditionnels de l'œuvre littéraire. Jusqu'à présent, j'ai lu quatre livres sur l'aristocrate et j'ai beaucoup apprécié trois d'entre eux, riant même peut-être à haute voix de temps en temps. Dans le film, l'humour s'est évaporé on ne sait où et on trouve une série de scènes où personne ne parle et où rien ne se passe, ce qui est pratiquement impossible dans le livre, toujours très actif. J'ai lu le premier il y a longtemps, mais au lieu de chevaux, il devrait y avoir des chiens indomptables et mal élevés qui courent autour du château, l'avocat devrait être un chouïa plus âgé et accompagné d'une fille adolescente insupportable, et une multitude de nuances fondamentales manquent dans le film. Malheureusement pour moi, le casting choisi ne m'a pas plu du tout, à deux exceptions près : Tatiana Vilhelmová et Yvona Stolařová. Vilhelmová assure au moins une petite part de comédie et Stolařová est crédible. De mon point de vue de lecteur, tous les autres sont très mal – voire stupidement – choisis. Je ne sais pas si j'aurai encore envie de regarder d'autres suites, du moins si elles sont abordées à la manière de ce misérable numéro un. (28/11/2023)

I have read Evžen Boček's excellent novel and was greatly amused by it, so I approached the film adaptation with a great deal of apprehension. But it was an unexpected surprise and a nice one at that. This is not to say that it was a major success, but I was expecting a much worse result. Jiří Vejdělek’s decision to remove the language barrier with Vivian wasn’t a particularly good one, depriving the film of a lot of potentially funny moments. Mr. Boček's humor was generally suppressed. On the plus side, the characters were well cast, excluding Zdeněk Piškula as Max (Zdeněk Piškula always gives me the impression that he’s about to start handing out the WatchTower magazine), especially Martin Pechlát was absolutely perfect as castellan Josef. All in all, I can't say it was a masterpiece, but I had fun and I’m not going to rate it low - slightly above average. It put me in a good mood. (12/05/2020)

I haven't read the book, but I believe that many of the humorous situations in the book work much better than in Jiří Vejdělek's film. However, given how bad current Czech films are, I was expecting a much bigger mess. The story flows quite decently to its sunny conclusion and is adorned with good performances by most of the cast, so I wasn't bored at all. One character even grew on me. The wonderful Eliška Balzerová simply matures like wine, or rather like a nut liqueur, which she vigorously offers to everyone in the role of a lively housewife. (60%) (31/01/2021)