Critic Reviews

Performed and directed with assured elegance, Kawasaki's Rose is a film that recognizes life as a tumultuous mess of both noble and base intensions and actions, as well as one that understands the thorny tragedies such chaos often leaves in its wake.

The point of this thoughtful, moving film is that the motives and actions that define human ethics are never simple and that the Communist regime was especially adept at exploiting this complexity for its own ends.

Kawasaki's Rose is the first Czech or Slovak film to address the issue of collaboration with the former Czechoslovakia's bygone secret police. That history must still be raw for some who survived the era, as it is in "The Lives of Others."

The problem with Kawasaki's Rose is that the theme is far more compelling than the movie.

Such overall familiarity makes the over-the-top soap-operatic elements, such as a histrionic screamathon between mom and daughter, that much more grating-and Hrebejk's upending of cathartic clichés that much more gratifying.

The longer director Jan Hrebejk's film goes on, the more complex the relationships become, until the film becomes little more than a talkathon.