Lida baarova biography sample
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On Baarová, shoe cream, and the phenomenon of cinematography
The feature documentary Doomed Beauty comes to theaters 1 January. Helena Třeštíková joins with co-director and editor Jakub Hejna to tell the story of the unsettling fate of first Republic star Lída Baarová. We met the director for an interview before Easter, after the first public screening for the media.
Doomed Beauty strikes me as a bit unconventional in the context of your work. On the one hand, by genre it is almost purely a compilation documentary. In terms of production it is your “most collaborative” film. It was produced by your daughter Hana, who also helped source archival materials. And above all –your co-director is credited as Jakub Hejna…
I’ve worked with Jakub for seven years as an editor, starting with René. We understand each other very well. It was he who encouraged me to work on Doomed Beauty. I requested that he do a remake of the documentary I made twenty years ago – The Sweet Bitterness of Lída Baarová. I filmed it back then with the eighty-one-year old actress over the course of four days in her flat in Salzburg. The runtime of the television documentary that resulted was only half an hour, so I had a great deal of unused material left over. At the time I asked Czech Televi
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Film Review: ‘Doomed Beauty’
What is the duty of the documentarian to the subject? Perhaps inadvertently, Helena Trestikova and Jakub Hejna’s knotty and engrossing non-fiction portrait of Lída Baarová, Czech actress and one-time mistress of Josef Goebbels, is as likely to provoke questions about the form itself as about the remarkable life it outlines. It forces us to notice how hard-wired we are to expect a biographical documentary, especially one composed largely of interviews with the person being examined, to humanize, perhaps even to exonerate, and certainly to create a degree of empathy, because “Doomed Beauty” does the opposite.
The Lída Baarová who emerges here is a remarkably unsympathetic creature, an unrepentant egoist, drowning in a sea of self-pity over events that happened half a century prior against a backdrop of suffering incalculably greater than her own, for which she seems to have had little regard. Ensnared by her own testimony, it’s not only hard to pay respect to this querulous figure, it’s difficult even to cough up the baser coin of pity — which is partly what makes for such gripping viewing.
It’s not simply a matter of Baarová being given enough r
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