Garden Store: Suitor

It’s an enjoyable comedy that, even without all the gardening context, has the chops to become more human. The truth is that the feud between the youth and their parents will never go away. At the same time, it's a fitting response to the squeamish who were expecting to laugh one more time. Now, they can go all out. (31/12/2017)

The best installment in the trilogy. Still a completely incoherent mess full of unnecessary scenes, unspoken motivations, incomprehensible characters and, in the tradition of this creative duo, insanely mishandled dialogue. I have two theories about why the Garden Store trilogy looks the way it does. I'm drawn to the first by the many glaring formal errors, especially in the editing. Often the cut often later than it should, sometimes it comes earlier. They fail at portraying transitions in time. All of a sudden, between two interior scenes, there is a shot of the protagonists in Stromovka Park in Prague, such that you can’t tell what it’s supposed to be telling you. In a film this well-funded I would never have expected that a second camera would appear at the edge of the frame or that no one would notice a microphone dipping into the frame. It gives me the feeling that Hřebejk got real tired of it sometime early on and tried to spend as little time on it as possible, and the longer the production went on, the more his mind was elsewhere. He probably didn't show up for post-production at all. My second theory is prompted by how the entire trilogy is so inhuman, mechanical, and lifeless. It's quite possible that an artificial intelligence was behind it, into which all (ALL!) of Hřebejk's previous films were uploaded as a frame of reference for it to use to create its own film. There are those attempts at poetic moments, the absurdity of the mundane, there is the indictment of human small-mindedness, the minor courage, the strong gestures, the tragedy and reconciliation. But it all seems to have been coldly compiled on the basis of these buzzwords alone. A silly but appealingly intimate scene of a couple getting back together over the phone is immediately ruined by the girl bounding out of the post office and dancing in the streets. An equally goofy but potentially quite endearing scene in which the whole family discovers that their daughter is still innocent because she has guilelessly blown up a condom like a balloon, such that they all poke at it out of relief, is degraded by the fact that it all has to be said out loud. And now it occurs to me – why did she break up with him in the first place? Geez, I hope it wasn't because she was scared after hearing her aunt's story that her vagina might reject her boyfriend's penis, was it? Jeez, now that I think about it, it must have been. Noooo. (08/09/2022)

If director Hřebejk had taken the trouble to turn the trilogy into a TV series, if he had divided it into at least six parts, and if he had played more with some of the motifs and left some out, this might have been really good. The way that it is, the trilogy tends to grow in quality, but even the last film isn't really great and doesn't wow you. (04/04/2018)