On Monday, January 12, the ceremonial premiere of the new film took place Slovak director and screenwriter Mariana Čengel Solčanská Štúr. “The narrator of my Štúr is Adela Ostrolúcka, I think that women in the middle of the 19th century in Slovakia had no voice, and I owe them a good space,” said Čengel Solčanská. She created the scenario based on her own book template.
The main character of Ľudovít Štúr, one of the greatest personalities of our history, was played by Lukáš Pelč, who is also the producer of the new film. According to him, viewers will come to the cinema on Štúr and discover a new star, Ivana Kološová, who played Adela Ostrolúcka. “She does it brilliantly,” Pelč commented on the film debut of the young actress.
In the case of Štúr, according to the director, the film is based on historically verified facts, archival sources and contemporary testimonies. She used fabulation when writing Adele’s storyline. “We don’t know anything about her, she didn’t even leave a diary, we don’t have a portrait of her, what was created was created only 20 years after her death. Adela provides a great space for fabulation,” she added.
The former adviser to Prime Minister Fico also accepted the invitation to the premiere Eduard Chmelár. According to his own words, he went to the cinema with slight skepticism. He did not hide on the social network that the previous films of Čengel Solčanská did not appeal to him much. “This piece could only pleasantly surprise me. It didn’t happen,” he wrote bluntly on Facebook. He called the film Štúr another missed chance.
„At the outset, I would like to appreciate the magnificent design and the innovative approach that this topic has been asking for for a long time. In the previous attempts, Štúr was depicted too scholastically – as a statue, a distant demigod, and not a man of flesh and bones. This is partly due to the fact that he himself was an extremely ascetic and solitary man, whose inner self is very difficult to capture. Even here it was not possible to break through the barrier of his mask. However, Mariana Čengel Solčanská tried to portray the Štúra period through the eyes of a woman. However, the ambitious project burned down right at the start,” the political analyst did not put a napkin in front of his mouth.
He concluded that we looked at the world through the eyes of Adela Ostrolúcká, and Štúr was completely lost in that story and was rather a marginal character. Čengel blames Solčanská for promising a film primarily about Ľudovít Štúr, his epoch-making linguistic work, and we did not get this result. “The director also admitted that the love relationship between Štúr and Ostrolúcká is just a legend, which is not confirmed by any reliable source.” he added.
He explained to the viewers that the story was invented by the first Slovak woman to receive a doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris, Helena Turcerová-Devečková. “In 1913, she defended her dissertation on Ľudovít Štúr, in which she imagined his love affair with Adela Ostrolúcká (apparently she relied on the fact that nobody in France knows anything about Štúr). This work fell into the hands of the writer Ľud Zúbek, who was inspired to write the book Jar Adela Ostrolúcká,” he shared the details.
Chmelár did not leave a thread dry even on the main protagonist. “An even bigger weakness than the low-quality script was the acting performance of the main character. Lukáš Pelč, like Ľudovít Štúr, did not convince me at allduring historical speeches, he acted as if he read them impersonally, as if they were not his, or as if he had been called to the blackboard in school and mechanically memorized the learned text, while his eyes darted nervously from side to side. I didn’t believe this character. Not everyone with a beard is Štúr,” he noted.
“Jozef Miloslav Hurban, played by the excellent Richard Autner, was more charismatic, and Štúr looked just like a member of his entourage with him. Not to mention Mark Igonda, who excelled in the role of Adele’s father Mikuláš Ostrolúcke and, in my opinion, with this acting performance he asked for the next film award Sun in the Network,” thinks Chmelár.
He then continued with sharp criticism. “However, I was horrified by some of the fictional scenes. As a film fan, I understand artistic invention, but as a historian, I am much stricter and believe that a great artist can portray a real event in an engaging way and does not need to invent it.” The meeting with Ján Hollý at Dobraj Voda was more reminiscent of the opening scene from The Lord of the Rings than a real historical event,” he wrote in his opinion.
He also named specific mistakes, such as the fact that the Štúrov team climbed Kriváň in a hot summer and not in a blizzard. The place where Štúr was shot was completely covered in snow in reality, while in the film it was a dry autumn. “Adela Ostrolúcka did not die of tuberculosis, but of typhus. Well, the highlight of it all was the scene when the members of the Štúrov family (in 1851!) talked about the fact that the Catholics would not join them in the written language project. At the same time, they have been negotiating with them since at least 1847 in Čachticy, since the codification of the Slovak language (as I have repeatedly pointed out) was a process, not an event,” he pointed out.
“The final argument between the Štúrov and Bernlák fans over individual voices is a farce, a caricature of a true historical event, which actually did not take place in some dark cottage, but in the palace on Primacialni námestí in Bratislava, where the theological faculty is located today. And Štúr and Hodž argued more than evangelicals and Catholics,” explained Chmelár.
He did not end there with critical statements. “However, I was most outraged by the mystification, as if from a Turkish soap opera, when the maid sent her boyfriend to Adela’s dark barn to make Miss Ostrolúcka feel that Ľudovít Štúr had made love to her… This wild fantasy is an unnecessary dishonor of Štúr himself, and in such a film it is downright disturbing, and I can’t decide whether it’s funny or embarrassing,” wrote an outraged political expert.
He ended the status with a small compliment. „On the contrary, visually I liked the final scene when the director depicted the dying Štúr as Christ taken down from the cross. The subsequent strong words from his speech at the Hungarian Diet strengthened his legacy. Except that two successful scenes do not make a good movie,” he said. “From this point of view, I evaluate it as a missed chance, which was not saved even by the standard good music of the band Hrdza. The topic of Štúr is still waiting for its full processing,” he added in the end.
