I attended a special premier of Jan Hřebejk’s last feature, The
Icing, at the Czech That Film Festival at
USC on March 31, 2015. Based on a play by Petr Kolečko, the film tells the
story of an unusual wedding ritual, where the bride is ‘kidnapped’ by the maid
of honor. The two show up at a remote pub during the Ice Hockey World
Championship, where the barmaid has bet all her lifesavings on the winner.
While the three get drunk drinking the house special, ‘Icing,’ secrets are
spilled, lies uncovered, and unintentional romances discovered.
With its fast pacing and confined
setting, the film’s conversation comedy becomes universal within the
conventions of the romantic comedy genre, yet very European in its approach, representative
of Czech New Wave cinema a period of social critique probing questions of Czech
identity and culture. The maid of honor, also the groom’s best girl, has been
sleeping with the bride’s fiancé! A later scene between the husband and his
best man reveals his intentions – she’s a Slav girl and he, as a respectful Czech,
must ‘tame’ her. His comments are reminiscent of the specific East/West tensions
touched up on in Im Juli, as well as
representative of traditional gender hierarchies. The ethnic boundaries between
Czech and Slav insert themselves into many issues within a gendered ceremony.
Touching upon European practices of
homophobia, closeted homosexual tendencies often become the butt of the joke,
for females and males alike. In order to escape the drunken rampage of the
bride upon realizing she slept with her husband a week before the wedding, the
maid of honor admits to being a lesbian. The bride demands she prove her ‘lesbianess’
by sleeping with the barmaid. Only after sleeping with the barmaid, does the
maid of honor confess she’s not a lesbian and is deeply in love with the groom.
The sequence implies a flexibility of gender, which acts more as an accessory
rather than a genetic trait in this film. Just like ethnicity, one wears his of
her gender as an article of clothing, subject to the manipulative objectives of
its owner. Indeed, beneath the icing, lies a complex array of secrets.
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