Charlatan

Jan Mikolasek diagnosed illness in Czechoslovakia by looking at a bottle of urine and prescribed treatment with plants. The queue at his door ran for kilometres, and his patients included senior figures both under Nazi occupation and under communist rule. He was put on trial in 1958. The subject is not whether the healing worked but the man himself. Mikolasek is hard, cold and shows his patients no tenderness, while carrying on a secret relationship with his assistant Frantisek. The film neither clears nor condemns him. The form moves between two time frames: the years of learning from his master in youth, and the investigation conducted in old age. The transitions go unexplained and the viewer makes the connection. Agnieszka Holland directs. Ivan Trojan leads, and his younger self is played by his real son Josef Trojan, so the shift in age is handed down inside a family. It screened at the Berlin film festival in 2020 and was submitted as the Czech entry for the international Oscar that year. Who it is for: viewers who like morally murky portraits of real people and Central European period cinema. Who it is not for: anyone waiting for a hero to sympathise with; the film keeps its protagonist deliberately unlikeable.