But Fanda, played superbly by Vlastimil Brodsky, refuses to go quietly into that dark night. Instead of tending to graves, he plays cheerful pranks on the world. Together with his old actor friend Eda (Stanislav Zindulka), he impersonates wealthy opera stars from abroad and subway inspectors to hustle fancy French meals and pecks on the cheek from pretty girls. When a particularly gutsy prank goes wrong, Fanda needs to find a lot of money fast -- or dip into the money Emilie set aside for their funerals.
Brodsky's performance as the old fool Fanda is graceful and sympathetic, and laced with enough sadness to give his flights into fancy a morbid edge. His levity is bought at a terrible price, and whenever the soundtrack gets too schmaltzy, Brodsky's terminal good humor grounds the movie in our shared fate. Shortly after "Autumn Spring" was completed, the seasoned Czech actor ("Jacob the Liar," "Closely Watched Trains") fell ill and committed suicide.
"Autumn Spring" is the kind of warm, uplifting champion-the-underdog film that studios now try to produce at any cost, a subgenre of world cinema that has been reduced to a formula. Many of these films fail miserably when the sentiment is obviously false.
