REVIEW: Self-taught life: When men are useless, a woman is found – News

Such is the story – summed up in the words of the main character – of the film Life for the Self-taught, which was written and filmed by screenwriter Jitka Rudolfová based on Barbora Šťastná’s book Love for the Self-taught.

Klára (Jana Plodková) is a married woman in her forties with two daughters, who lives a so-called normal life: work and household in an eternal carousel, which she is quite upset about. Nevertheless, even after fifteen years of marriage, she feels that this is how it should be.

And it is the half-round wedding anniversary that prompts her to do an act that has no precedent in her family: she invites her husband (Jaroslav Plesl) to a restaurant for a festive dinner. But instead of a bouquet, she gets football boots.

Confused and unsure, she throws herself into a whirlwind of dating guys she either happens to meet years later or searches for on dating sites. Meanwhile, he tries with varying success to raise both daughters, the older of whom is experiencing puberty in full bloom, and the younger of whom is more attracted to motorcycle trips with dad than time spent with mom, who has something else entirely on her mind. And because she works in a lifestyle magazine, her boss introduces an even more horrible influencer and relationship coach, Marcela/Muriel (Barbora Seidlová), into her life, who is supposed to teach her to love herself live on social networks.

There are certainly more than a small number of women who go through the basic movie plot of marriage – breakup – finding a new partner and balance, so one could admit that Life for the Self-taught is a film about life, so to speak. And if the screenwriter and director Rudolfová had consistently followed the principle of exaggeration and added humor, it could have really been a comedy (as the film is presented) on a rather played-out but attractive subject.

Unfortunately, she didn’t do either very well, so the film vacillates between sometimes successful comedic scenes and delivery of relationship wisecracks.

These are sometimes literally ear-splitting, and are mostly delivered either by talking heads in detail across the entire screen, or, even worse, by the main character as narrator.

Although her self-irony is in place, because she really often behaves like an “old cow”, but because self-irony alternates with self-pity, the whole thing is on the one hand unbalanced, on the other hand completely unnecessary and somewhat boring.

Rudolfová got a rather luxurious cast, in addition to Plodková and Plesl, there was also Zuzana Krónerová in the role of Klara’s eccentric mother, the new, however generally horrible suitors are played by Václav Neužil, David Švehlík and Lukáš Příkazký.

Nevertheless, the direction led them to performances that, especially in the first part, seem surprisingly convulsive and unnatural. And while they do get better over time, so the viewer feels like it’s happening chronologically and they’ve played each other out, none of them gave their best performance here.