Reviews & Ratings for
Carriage to Vienna More at IMDbPro »Kocár do Vídne (original title)

9 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
Masterpiece, 12 May 2003

Author: crocuta

Kocár do Vídne is really the masterpiece of Czech movie school. The movie shows the common people in the war, not heros. Enemy soldiers are not animals. Warriors of freedom can also rape women.

Iva Janzurová acts amazingly, she proved she is one of the greatest Czech actresses ever. Although she is known and great in comedies, this was maybe her first drama role. And it worked pretty good!

1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
Dark night of the soul, 9 March 2011

Author: chaos-rampant from Greece

This movie about a Czech widow escorting two soldiers of the Reich on a coach to Vienna as she plots her revenge is a bright example of the breach with visual narrative I value in the best of New Wave films, of the peeling back of established rules to reveal new ways of making cinema, the disassociation of the common rules of stagebound studio filmmaking, the possibilities of discovery created by a curious roaming camera.

If you're inclined to read the enormity of nature, deserts or forests, as existential playgrounds, the movie will give you ample opportunity. Karel Kachyna plays out a nightmare poem of innocence plucked from the stem, of lives torn asunder by guilt and desperation, and with the progression of this journey through a sunless forest that never seems to end he sketches in clear pencil strokes how the madness of war creates moral conundrums punishing for the soul.

I come to this mostly for the pleasure of a freewheeling cinema, but the viewer who values the faith restoring pathos of classicist cinema, Dick's change of heart in Casablanca, will be graced with a soaring finale. How much the finale will resonate with the viewer, or crush him, boils down to that. Me, I view this mode as more a reflection of a storytelling demand for catharsis than a reflection of a true world, an affirmation of the expected rather than a breach with it, so in the context of this films I'm left a little indifferent to it.

A fascinating small touch for me, is when the soldier hears bells ringing from afar and leaps for joy, confident the bloodshed has finally ended. But is that so, the film never lets out.

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