Ice Mother |2017 Tribeca Film Festival Review

All That Weather Allows: Slama Formulates Empathetic Character Drama from Microwaved Melodrama

Taking a page from a formula established by Douglas Sirk’s classic soapy melodrama All That Heaven Allows (1955), Czech director Bohdan Slama retools this sentimentalism for his latest feature Ice Mother, a well-crafted vehicle for actress Zuzana Kronerova (who has appeared in each of the director’s previous four features). Widowed and all alone in a home which is now too large to manage alone, she has remained content with availing herself to her hopelessly selfish sons and their less than amiable wives, who are attempting to push her to sell the family home, each for their own clandestine reasons.

With a narrative arch as clichéd as it is emotionally gratifying in its protagonist’s attenuated characterization, this has the potential to be Slama’s widest reaching endeavor yet, following Film Movement’s extended art-house distribution for 2008’s The Country Teacher, and the 2012 Sundance competing Four Suns (which has yet to snag a distributor stateside).

At the center of her volatile family, 67-year-old Hana (Zuzana Kronerova) finds herself at the mercy of her sons’ designs following the death of her husband. For their own personal reasons, the successful Ivan (Vaclav Neuzil) and his less fortunate brother Petr (Marek Daniel) goad Hana into selling her home. Petr has an interest in using the payoff to decrease his considerable debt, while Ivan wants Hana to move in with his family so she can take care of the household and watch after his son Ivanek (Daniel Vizek), an increasingly morose young boy who is constantly bullied at school. One day while looking for Ivanek, who disappears momentarily during an outing, Hana spies the body of a man floating in the river. Helping to fish him out, she discovers Brona (Pavel Novy) is part of a group of competitive ice swimmers, and slowly she is invited into Brona’s circle of friends before a romantic interest transpires between them. Hana’s new found independence aggravates her family members, but she decides to seize this unexpected opportunity of love for herself.

We’ve seen plenty of narratives built on the shoulders of women in their middle-aged or golden years, cast aside as their usefulness fades, their health and their accumulated property a burden on the loved ones they continue to support either emotionally or financially. In this regard, Ice Mother is nothing new, despite the novelty of its central motif, the frigid winter water sport seemingly the only activity which thaws her emotional stupor.

Once a customarily cruel and tense introduction to her dwindling familial dynamics subsides, nearly all the usual pieces fall into place, including a new suitor who hardly meets her middle class family’s social standards (in this regard, the film most closely resembles Sirk’s 1950s melodrama, unlike the racial issues which informed famed recapitulations by Fassbinder and Todd Haynes). Tonally speaking, Ice Mother and Kronerova’s performance feel comparable to the bleaker but similar Requiem for Mrs. J from Serbia, in which another aged matriarch looks to secure her children’s future despite their lack of interest in her well-being.

Whereas Kronerova is the emotional heart of the film, many of the supporting characters, including her onerous sons, are run-of-the-mill grade types of general unpleasantness. On either side of the haves and have not divide, their materialistic tendencies ruin their own familial structures, but neither registers as anything more than garden variety narcissist. Pavel Novy’s crusty Brona (who has the same affinity for chickens as the J.K. Simmons character in The Meddler, 2015) is allowed some secrets which account for the narrative’s estrangement, although his relationship with her grandson and the child’s subsequent bullying at school oscillate between moments either a tad belabored or outright clichéd.

Slama begins to have a little fun as Hana breaks out of her shell (another female ice swimmer tells Hana early on, “the only thing you have to do is die,” when Hana excuses herself on behalf of familial responsibility), discovering new facets of herself and new uses for her home (like having Brona and his cronies over for a gathering where Hana dons a Marilyn Monroe The Seven Year Itch dress and creates her own exciting environment a la Capra’s You Can’t Take it With You). But too often we’re brought back to a cycle of conflict and resolution (albeit in Hana’s favor) with her family members, whose lives dive into a tailspin almost immediately after she strikes off to explore her own interests.

Sans a rather mollifying birthday party where Hana’s children belittle her interest in Brona and ice swimming, some of these beats feel as if they could have been excised in order to better convey the attraction between Brona and Hana. Despite its familiar mannerisms, however, Slama does manage to glide Ice Mother to a smooth close, on a beat which actually feels a tad unexpected.

Reviewed on April 23rd at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival – World Narrative Competition. 105 Mins.

★★★/☆☆☆☆☆