Home Care

Description

A diligent, dedicated model of service and sacrifice, tireless home-care nurse Vlasta (the wonderfully expressive Alena Mihulová, who won the Crystal Globe for best actress at Karlovy Vary) traipses around the south Moravia countryside on bus and foot tending to (and bantering with) patients too infirm or elderly to travel to a clinic. At home, she cooks and cleans for her gruff husband (Boleslav Polivka), whose concern for her well-being consists mainly of pouring shots of brandy and suggesting ways to finagle gas money from her state-run employer. Writer-director Slávek Horák, drawing on his mother’s real-life experiences and shooting at his parents’ house, depicts Vlasta’s routine with an ingratiating mix of realism, absurdity and irony. Generally skeptical of her clients’ traditions and superstitions on the one hand and of New Age therapies on the other, Vlasta is compelled to consider them both when she’s diagnosed with a serious illness. Seeking comfort and a cure, she turns to a collection of women healers. The Czech Republic’s Oscar submission in the Foreign Language Film category is strewn with irreverent one-liners and daring gallows humor—Vlasta accidentally drops her cell phone into an open grave in one memorable scene—and yet Home Care attains a rueful, healing tone of acerbic exuberance en route to a graceful and touching ending. —Michael Fox

Trailer

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