Prague in the late 80s: while melancholy violin music can be heard in the background, the camera follows an inconspicuous woman through dreary weather. It is Marie Skalova (Tatiana Pauhofová), a violinist who fled to London in 1977, who is looking for her husband Viktor (Martin Myšička). She is afraid. After the notorious dissident disappeared without a trace after a car accident in the Czech Republic, she too is in danger. Marie is being pursued by the Stasi and is threatened with arrest – although she hardly knows anything about her husband’s political entanglements.
Already with the crime series Wasteland Ivan Zachariáš showed that he knows how to use the history of his Czech homeland as an artistic template. With the six-part mini-series The sleepers, which is now on Arte, the director tells the story of a couple after the fall of the Iron Curtain, which at the end of communism fell into the sights of the Ministry for State Security. The opening credits, which are atypically action-free, are already unsettling.
In a series of cross-sectional images, the intro shows sleeping protagonists – on the kitchen chair, in the armchair, at the workplace. Nothing happens for a long time and everyone waits eagerly for the music to fall silent and for the action to begin in 1989 in the East amid a conspiracy by the British and Soviet secret services. Of course you also meet clichés: the angry Russian, the stiff English woman, the passionate opposition.
Viktor is omnipresent, but hardly to be seen. He remains a mystery
But it’s not quite as simple as it seems at first. The presence of the figures, some of which is described in detail, makes pigeonhole thinking difficult. So one finally sympathizes with the calculating agent, whose wife is dying, and feels pity for the ice-cold civil servant who falls into the hands of the communists. Marie’s husband Viktor, who is omnipresent but hardly visible due to his disappearance, remains a mystery to the viewer. It seems in black and white The sleepers not to be given, just the beige-brown filter that weighs down on everything.
The series shines not only through this ambivalence, but also through simple camera work and sober scenes. Because it is precisely the camera’s apparent disinterest in the moments of brute force that gives the images their strength. So when crude questioning methods are used in the torture cellar of the Czech State Security, the gaze remains calmly on the smoking agent. The screams of the tormented are – as so often in The sleepers – drowned out by melancholy violin music.
A gloomy, claustrophobic narrative tone, nihilistic atmosphere and a constant contradiction between the inner workings of the protagonists and the political circumstances The sleepers appear plausibly oppressive. The beauty of the Czech capital, detailed backdrops and peaceful scenes, followed by unimagined brutality make the series worth seeing.
Die Schläfer, six episodes, Thursday, 9.45 p.m., Arte, and in the media library