Zatracení
**½/****
starring Jan Plouhar, Jan Révai, Isabela Bencová, Dana Vávrová
written and directed by Dan Svátek
by Walter Chaw The first drug-themed film to be shot in the Kingdom of Thailand, Czech director Dan Svátek's The Damned is a handheld, vérité version of Return to Paradise (or Brokedown Palace, or Midnight Express) as two Czech nationals find themselves adrift in an island nirvana before being spirited away to a third-world prison. A handful of gritty, genuinely affecting Blair Witch moments, aided immeasurably by a gorgeously vigorous performance from Czech star Jan Révai, lend the picture an H-tinted immediacy and, now and again, a taste of the true horror of draconian drug laws to foreign nationals accustomed to broader freedoms–or, at the least, justice that is neither so swift nor so sure. (The sharpest twist of the screw comes as a woman informs a young heterosexual man just imprisoned that his days of vaginal sex are a distant memory.) Never a pretty picture, The Damned heightens the grimness of its setting with its jittery DV medium, achieving at once an intimacy and colour-bleached desolation (note a moonlit-suicide with blood cast jet-black) that transcends its amateurish score and melodramatic instincts. (The worst moment arrives when it's revealed–none-too-subtly–that a prisoner is reading the collected works of Samuel Beckett.) Missteps and amateurishness aside, The Damned is a promising work that bodes well for Svátek as well as for the DV medium, which, with the dual triumphs this year of 24 Hour Party People and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, appears to be coming into its own.
