‘Don Juans’ Opens the 44th IFFI in Goa

The 44th International Film Festival of India will open on November 20 in Goa with the screening of ‘Don Juans’, the latest film by one of the best known Czech film and theatre directors, Jiri Menzel. He is also a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award at this festival. ‘Don Juans’ revolves around the rehearsal of Mozart’s Don Giovanni at a regional Czech theatre. The movie is the 16th feature film in Menzel’s long and much-rewarded career which began in the Communist era in 1966 with ‘Closely Watched Trains’. It is an ode to the gentle seducers of the world and the women who love them. The middle aged Vitek (Jan Hartl) is the director of a small regional opera company who serially beds his sopranos. Then there’s elderly Jakub (Martin Huba), a Czech opera singer who’s made his career in USA but returns home to prove he still can perform. Vitek hires Jakub as the star of a production of Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni’- Don Juans- at the local opera house. Old friends despite the age gap, they share a bond as ageing Lotharios. Into their lives comes Marketa (Libuse Safrankova), an amateur singer, Jakub’s age, who solicites Vitek to help stage a children’s chorale in a theatre threatened by redevelopment. It turns out that all three have more in common than they know including a daughter born out of a wedlock and a granddaughter, both of whom had Don Juans of their own. “There’s a bit of Don Juan in every guy’, one woman says. “Every Don Juan leaves a teary-eyed girl in his wake”, says another. This could be the stuff of tragedy in different hands than Menzel’s. Here it’s a deadpan comedy, a fable where no one actually gets hurt. Courtesy: Press Information Bureau (pib.nic.in)