It's not called a Royale With Cheese, but according to a pair of Czech crooks at the opening of Jan Hrebejk's smug comedy-drama Up And Down, they serve deep-fried bat down in Thailand. From these Pulp Fiction beginnings, Herbejk (Divided We Fall) steers his own vast ensemble down separate, thematically connected tracks, but he really means to update the go-for-broke energy and politics of the Czech New Wave for a new, post-communist country. Whatever its merits, Up And Down can't be faulted for a lack of ambition, as it expands into a sweeping thesis on the class and racial schisms that represent the current state of the disunion. But after a promising start, Herbejk loses the thread, interweaving two different stories that are crudely looped together under the broad theme of life in the new multicultural Europe. Each new development gets progressively less interesting.
There's a fascinating movie to be made about Up And Down's initial two oily crooks, who smuggle a truckload of immigrants across the border and dump their human cargo in the middle of nowhere. After unloading too hastily, they're later shocked to discover that a baby was left behind in the trailer, but rather than seeking its mother, they leave the child with their black-market cronies at a Prague pawnshop. But all that intrigue is really just a setup for the real story, which involves the infant's adoption by a slightly deranged mother (Natasa Burger) and her lunkhead husband (Jirí Machácek), a reformed soccer hooligan whose prison record kept them from getting a child legally. Their earnest attempt to become a real family generates some humor and poignancy… but wait, there's more! Herbejk adds on another major plotline involving Petr Forman, an Australian émigré who returns to Prague after his estranged father (Jan Triska) collapses from a brain tumor. Their reunion is complicated by the awkward condition that Forman's former girlfriend (Ingrid Timková) is now his stepmother.
The challenge of making movies like Pulp Fiction or Magnolia, with their multiple interlocked storylines, is that the chain tends to only be good as its weakest link. Though mother and father are both too cartoonishly drawn, the adoption thread remains the most compelling by far, because it captures the simple desperation of this hard-luck couple while touching on all the capital-letter themes Herbejk wants to address. Whenever he cuts away to the wan Forman—son of the great Czech director Milos Forman (The Loves Of A Blonde, Amadeus), which explains his curious presence here—Up And Down sags into a dreary, humorless family melodrama that lacks the space to develop more fully. Next time, Herbejk might want to just pick one movie and run with it.