Swings film with Dagmar Havlová: review of Bohdan Sláma’s new comedy

The new comedy-drama “Swings” (Houpačky) by director Bohdan Sláma, starring Dagmar Havlová Veškrnová and Zuzana Kronerová, has been showing in Czech cinemas since Thursday. The film follows two pensioners who rebel against old age and illness, and it has received a scathing review: the critic found it a failure in almost every respect.

It is already the third recent Czech film about old people who behave oddly and are presumably meant to be funny. “Swings” was preceded by Jan Svěrák’s “Five Plums” and Hana Hendrychová’s “Bardotky”. In the reviewer’s view, Svěrák at least tried to talk about the real problems of old age, while “Swings” is closer to a failed populist comedy like “Bardotky”.

What the film is about and who stars in it

Havlová’s character, Zdena, is slightly out of touch with reality. At the start she runs into Jiřina, a prim former school principal (played by Kronerová) by chance. The two women grow close and begin helping each other out. Most of their trouble comes from unbearable relatives.

Jiřina is stuck with a perpetually dissatisfied husband, Pavel (Jiří Labus), and a son, Emil (Jiří Rendl), who is ill-suited to ordinary life. Zdena is dogged by her daughter Jana (Tereza Ramba), who is nervous, hysterical and sees only the bad in her mother. The reviewer calls this a parade of the worst stereotypes of mainstream Czech comedy.

What went wrong

The main problem, according to the reviewer, is that the characters have almost nothing but negative traits, while the minor characters forgive the two “grannies” literally everything. For much of the film someone is shouting or overacting, and it is unclear whether this is a failed populist comedy or an auteur statement on old age. By the critic’s assessment, the film works in neither genre. There is nothing funny at all, and only in the second half are there two or three scenes that touch, in any way, on the painful sides of later life.

Zdena apparently suffers from a serious neurological illness: she does not know where she is and cannot control her bladder, yet she behaves like a mischievous lover of her garden and egg liqueur. The heroines’ friendship essentially rests on this, and the film fails to make it convincing. The camera keeps swooping in on the actresses from odd angles, and the music, like the daughter’s regular intrusions, only adds to the overload. The daughter is a doctor, yet she fails to notice that her mother needs not a scolding but a medical examination.

The reviewer described Havlová Veškrnová’s performance as mugging: she unsuccessfully plays some kind of impish sprite with an incipient neurodegenerative disease. The more restrained and convincing Kronerová is given a role with no inner logic, so she has to play it intuitively, according to the needs of individual scenes.

Sláma no longer manages what he once did

Early in his career, in “Wild Bees”, Sláma knew how to show people, above all young ones, in a specific time and place. In his recent work that specificity is falling apart. The reviewer recalls “Baba z ledu”, also with Kronerová, where the script was schematic but at least did not rush through the family and the heroine’s transformation. The village in the drama “The End of the World”, set in the summer of 1968, was already a thoroughly bizarre world. “Swings” lowers the bar even further: it abandons any realistic setting and in tone comes close to the films of Zdeněk Troška, where people are mostly coarse and brash.

The film is based on the book of the same name by Lucie Konečná. It has no plot: two women aimlessly pedal around on bicycles they cannot ride, fool about, look for marijuana at a market, have a pillow fight, break into someone else’s cottage and steal something. It never becomes funny, and the heroines feel no sense of liberation or therapy. By the finale, where there should have been moral dilemmas or a dark note, the viewer, in the reviewer’s words, merely shrugs in bewilderment. The review closes with an image: the film is like an axe that keeps getting stuck in dangerously close to your head.

Film details: “Swings” (Houpačky), comedy/drama, Czechia, 2026, 99 minutes. Director: Bohdan Sláma. Cast: Dagmar Havlová Veškrnová, Zuzana Kronerová, Tereza Ramba, Jiří Rendl, Zuzana Hesová, Jiří Konvalinka, Jiří Labus, Martin Jeřábek, Ivo Gogál, Patrik Balonek and others.

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Around Prague, based on reporting by seznamzpravy.cz