“I’m a lover, not a fighter / And I’m really built for speed,” sang Kinks frontman Ray Davies in at least one of the songs that shares a title with Slovakian writer-director Martina Buchelová‘s hugely appealing first feature. The first half of that lyric is true of Andrej (Adam Kubala), the shambling 20-year-old protagonist of this generation-specific romantic comedy; the second, not so much, as he spends much of this deliberately meandering, discursive film trying to restart a life that has stalled in spite of all his worst efforts. Structured as a patchwork of loosely connected, inconsistently chronological episodes, “Lover, Not a Fighter” feels rhythmically shaggy in a way that reflects the insecurities, anxieties and liberties of GenZ living, without patronizing its drifting characters.
A Slovakian-Czech co-production that premiered to gales of laughter from local audiences at Karlovy Vary, Buchelová’s debut stands as an unusually crowdpleasing winner of the festival’s Proxima competition — a showcase intended as an adventurous, discovery-oriented counterpart to the fest’s main Crystal Globe awards, and often given over to more experimental works. With its freewheeling construction and distinctive, deadpan comic tone, “Lover, Not a Fighter” is plenty unconventional, but still broadly accessible — perhaps not every iota of its peculiar Eastern European humor translates, but more than enough does to make for a potential word-of-mouth charmer on the festival circuit going forward.
Some of the film’s more precious affectations — notably its longwinded chapter headings and intertitles, heavy on irony and incidental detail — would risk being grating if they weren’t also funny, in line with the protagonist’s own droll, distracted way of expressing himself. “About Andrej, who doesn’t hang out at tram stops anymore, but sits in a tree and lives with his grandma,” reads his onscreen introduction, which may be a bit cute, but certainly paints a picture. No longer a teenager but not yet ready for adulthood, Andrej is semi-estranged from his parents (who have split, and appear considerably more preoccupied with their new partners than with their son), and given to binge-drinking; unsurprisingly, he’s some way off finding a direction in life.
In an attempt to save himself from himself, he moves in with his loving, good-humored but helpfully no-nonsense grandmother (Jaroslava Pokorná), and quits drinking cold turkey, though not his enduring oddball habit of climbing trees in public. The arrangement works well, at least until his similarly aged, similarly adrift cousin Pet’o (František Beleš) hits on the same idea, cuing an awkward turf war between two young men more alike than they realize in their social ineptitude.
Such concerns become secondary, however, when Andrej is smitten by shy, sharp-witted Miša (Michaela Kostková) and she, against all odds, sees something in his hangdog slacker energy. It’s not long, however, before he gauchely scuppers whatever they had going; the ensuing romantic repair job is a halting one, further delayed by sidebars involving Miša’s romantically naïve younger sister (Mia Sofia Arpášová) and doomsday-fixated father (Jaro Vojtek), not to mention the cousins’ gradual rapprochement.
In drawing and assembling these variously angry, eccentric or unmoored characters, Buchelová’s fleet, witty script resists the kind of banal generational generalizations that are currently the preserve of front-facing comedy: There’s refreshingly little meme-style humor in a film that rests heavily on well-written, sometimes squirmingly uncomfortable conversation. But the film does identify something truthful and empathetic in the behavioral quirks and blind spots of a generation reared online — even Adam Mach’s limber, unpolished camerawork evokes the roaming spontaneity of smartphone shooting — in times of constant political, economic and environmental pessimism, as well as those of their elders, who probably could have set a less chaotic and self-involved example for living.
Helping keep us largely on the kids’ side is a performance of great goofball physicality and amiably behind-the-beat delivery by Kubala, who never makes Andrej a complete punchline — even when he’s peering out at the world through the folds of his duvet on the living-room floor, watching anemic morning TV and eating preserved cherries from the jar. We’ve all been that loser at some point or other in our lives, which makes it easy to invest in his haphazard recovery project — and in his would-be romance with Miša, also rendered a real, intelligent, slightly messy person rather than a sitcom type by Kostková.
“Lover, Not a Fighter” isn’t programmatic in its whimsy; even when it’s aggravating, it’s humanly so. “I don’t think that you’re a bad person, but you are very sad, and that’s why you’re so stupid,” says Pet’o to his cousin in what passes for a tender moment between them — a statement of blunt candor and compassion that rather matches the approach of Buchelová’s strange, sweet, winning film.
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