Bird Atlas

The beginning felt strange to me, but then the story unfolded and offered an interesting theme, which we should not underestimate for many reasons. Although it may seem unbelievable and incomprehensible to a happily engaged or married person, as Alena Mihulová herself commented, unfortunate, naive, and love-seeking people walk the Czech Republic and the world. They will indulge in any hint of dreamed happiness, succumb, and sacrifice everything, even though they detach themselves from reality. Olmo Omerzu confirms the reputation of an original and remarkable director who manages to captivate with each new film. And he always casts his court actress and my great favorite Eliška Křenková. Just as I liked the dog insert in the Family Movie, I also appreciate the cute bird intermezzos. At least one statue could have been handed out tonight. (05/03/2022)

A brilliantly executed first act. It hooked me up with interesting characters and a story shrouded in mystery, and I was really curious to see where it was all going and what was behind it. Moreover, the performances are almost all well above-par, and Donutil could easily take home the award for acting. But from the scene in the mountain cottage, or more specifically, from the moment when one character utters a completely unintentional "profanity" (a great example of lazy screenwriting – I almost said "ouch" out loud as it hurt), the film completely stopped working for me and the whole thing seemed to fall apart – thematically, in tone, in the logic of the characters' behaviour and in the performances. Suddenly it's clear what's going on, and the film stops moving forward. What Bird Atlas is ultimately about – and what I obviously don't want to spoil – is an interesting cinematic theme, familiar from the occasional police procedural, but from my point of view they didn’t handle it convincingly. For me it was a disappointment, but in the first act I really thought it was very good. And the scenes with the birds... they seemed like a rather random and shallow joke to make the film more formally special, they simply don’t fit organically with the rest. (23/08/2021)

Who is the magpie? Who is the jackdaw? The sparrows are already chirping on the rooftops about how the crazy huntress will fall for it and the patriarch, alone in the nest, will be plucked clean. The audience is kept in suspense for a long time about how everything will turn out, only to be released at the end without any significant impact, and the message that your past will catch up with you in the future flew away with a flock of starlings. Miroslav Donutil, in fulfilling the Norwegian proverb that true love, sledding, and bird hunting never last long, successfully alternated between just two expressions. Soon I will die and you can die. (05/06/2023)

Olmo Omerzu had a stroke of luck when he cast Miroslav Donutil in the lead role. He shone here with an absolutely precise acting performance. Bird Atlas points to the truly cautionary fact that on the one hand, today's man "enjoys" the conveniences of contemporary civilization while on the other, blindly continuing in their eternal chase after mammon. Money and wealth are becoming the object of worship! With the help of (fittingly symbolic) bird chirping, the filmmakers slip a few pearls of wisdom into the story, most of which we all know well. But the problem is that we never really lived according to them, or perhaps we did not really want to. And perhaps this is the crux of why the film did not appeal to many viewers. (80%) (23/03/2022)

Olmo Omerzu's Czech film is neither distinctly Czech nor global. It's an attempt to capture a fragment of a certain part of Europe, but unfortunately, it ends up being not very appealing to the Czech audience. Specifically, the theme of "Atlas of Birds" is a seemingly clever metaphor about the bitter downfall of a family business, whose head remains an arrogant alpha male until his last breath. However, the reasons for this downfall are as banal as classic infidelity can be. Additionally, the script focuses too much on a naive fraud involving a scorned ex-lover and neglects the broader context of the deception. Olmo Omerzu and Petr Pýcha do not seem to be mature enough creators to analyze the disintegration of a personality and instead prefer to hide behind dialogues among the treetops. (21/07/2024)