Three women, all in various stages of life, worlds intersect on a day mysterious natural/unnatural (it’s never fully revealed the cause, only some speculation) eruptions/fissures happen in their city. There’s a Hana (played by Tatjana Medvecká), a recent widow who isn’t dealing with her grief, Tereza (played by Nora Klimesová), a girl who has just become a teen and struggles to connect with her peers, and Silva (played by Beata Kanokova), a stressed out mother.
Ordinary Failures from director Cristina Grosan and screenwriter Klára Vlasáková begins with an explosion. Then it splits into chapters of our three leads and the beginnings of their day. A repeated motif in these chapters is a news clip where we hear a report about the explosion we began the film on. The clip ends just after saying it could be a “one-off incident.” The fact that it’s said more than once, even in the background, indicates the opposite. And as expected, another incident occurs. What did come as a surprise though, was that this was the point the title card came. It was about 2/3rds of the way through the movie, an unusual choice, certainly not ordinary, but it worked.
Now, I’m not sure when the film is supposed to be set, it definitely seemed a little near-fi, because the robot dog Hana clung to as the last tie to her deceased husband is unlike any robot toy I’ve seen, but not too far off. The mall itself fits mostly within our present reality. It might even skew a little vintage as most no longer carry an arcade. Additionally, the matching clothes Tereza and her mother wear for Tereza’s birthday have that futuristic retro throwback style. I can’t say the pseudo-future style was always effective (and if that toy truly exists and it was just set in the present, I apologize) because it didn’t really add anything to the story, and the robot dog could’ve been replaced with another item.
They did a better job of interconnecting Hana to Tereza and Tereza to Silva than they did Silva and Hana, but I like that the point of connection between each of them is rendering aid. Though Tereza’s aide to Silva (via her son) while helpful in that she saw a problem and found a solution, it appears that if she didn’t try to help, she probably would’ve saved Silva some emotional distress.
If we look at the characters, while Hana and Tereza show character growth, Silva does not. Hana’s journey allows her to finally grieve her husband. Tereza’s journey allows her to connect with another kid. But Silva starts and ends the film stressed and probably questioning her motherhood. We meet her stressed out because her son has injured another boy, and she has to take him to apologize alone. After a stressful negotiation to get her son ready (in which he calls her a bad mother), she achieves success, only for that mother to tell her she needs therapy because, apparently, her mentality is why her son acted out. And in the brief moment to herself, away from her son while he’s supposed to be safe in a mall kid’s play area, the second “natural” disaster happens, and she loses her son. After having spent so much of the film thinking she was a bad mother, losing him at such a heightened time could not have helped her confidence. So even if she took a beat at the end and had another breath with her wife and son, I don’t think she was any less stressed.
I really liked the constant use of little fires/sparks, especially the ones on the streetcars. I also liked how they chose to do the credits, having the three leads named simultaneously.
Ordinary Failures (Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, Slovakia) premiered at Venice in the autonomous section Giornate Degli Autori.
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