Hadí jed (Serpent’s Poison). 1981. Czechoslovakia. Directed by František Vláčil. Screenplay by Vláčil, Irena Charvátová. With Josef Vinklář, Ilona Svobodová, Ferdinand Krůta. 35mm, courtesy Národní filmový archiv. In Czech; English subtitles. 87 min.
Best known for his historical epics of the 1960s (Marketa Lazarová, The Valley of the Bees), František Vláčil made this bleak chamber drama about alcoholism nearly two decades later, as the disease had consumed much of his own life. Eighteen-year-old Vladka is told by her dying mother that her father, whom she has never met, is alive; after a search, she finds him drilling geological test wells in the snowy highlands. As played by Josef Vinklář, her father is a charming but pitiful alcoholic she comes to love despite her instincts—and yet, true to Vláčil’s fatalistic worldview, their tentative bond cannot survive the serpent’s poison of addiction. Shot in severe black and white, the film pares Vláčil’s once-elaborate visual language down to plain medium shots in cramped, intimate settings, a spare interrogation into the seeming inability of humans to ever change their habitual behaviors.