As the affecting Czech sort-of-romantic comedy Empties opens, curmudgeonly high school teacher Josef Tkaloun (Zdenec Sverak) does his best to communicate profundity to arrogant high schoolers.
"For a little love, I would go to the edge of the world bareheaded and barefooted," he passionately recites, quoting Czech author Jaroslav Vrchlicky.
His furious response to their snotty apathy leads to him to quit on the cusp of what would have been his retirement. And against the backdrop of those words, it sets in motion a portrait of a runamok rascal, who touches the lives of many while ignoring the erstwhile love of his life at home.
Tkaloun -- played by the real-life father of Empties' acclaimed director Jan Sverak (Kolya) -- is the kind of older man whom older women reflexively refer to as an "old goat." There is hardly a young woman he meets who doesn't generate erotic fantasies in his head (there is a repeated sex-on-a-train motif, starring a woman colleague from his former school).
At the same time, as per Dylan Thomas, he "rages against the dying of the light," defying retirement, first by taking the kamikaze-like job of bike courier -- until inevitably injuring himself. He then lands the kind of mindless service job that "is what you make it." He's hired by a local supermarket to run the empties-return booth, in a city of prodigious beer consumption. Flanked by his taciturn, ex-army shift-mate Chatter (Pavel Landovsky) and a feckless young man named Shorty (Jan Budar), he turns the bottle return into a kind of community meeting place -- a roost from which he can flatter old ladies, orchestrate the love lives of his workmates, his religious zealot daughter (Tatiana Vilhelmova) and his teacher buddy Robert (Jiri Machacek) and ponder the sexual invitations of the aforementioned headmistress Ptackova (Nela Boudova).
All of which seems like less than benign busymaking to his wife Eliska (Daniela Kolarova), who is herself the object of infatuation of a businessman who's hired her to teach him German. While Josef plays life-of-the-party, she walks around carrying the sad weight of realization that her husband seemingly prefers to be anywhere but with her.
Meanwhile, vague plans of automating the bottle-return process hang over his job, like a retirement-wolf at the door.
There is redemption, of course, an almost Hollywoodish last act wherein Josef attempts to rekindle his wife's youthful ardour (and his own) with a good, old-fashioned, adrenaline-pumping stunt. Not that he "finds religion" or anything. Part of the charm of Empties is that its protagonist really learns no lessons, nor changes his ways in any sort of predictable character arc. To some moviegoers, the kind who need someone to "like," this would be a fault.
Indeed, it's no surprise that there were reports of Sveraks father-and-son clashing on-set over Josef's character. There is a verisimilitude to Josef's peculiar blend of prickliness and passion, and the elder Sverak really seems to have injected no small amount of himself into this fully fleshed-out character. He's not always likeable, but he is believable.
(This film is rated PG)
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