Warning: Stop reading if you haven’t seen the movie yet! Really, you should not read this before if you want to enjoy all the details of the movie!

Plot

This is a linearized version of the plot. In the movie it was shown in a different order to achieve a greater effect.

A group of Czech filmmakers decided to shoot a movie with unclear idea what genre and topic it should be. They know, they want to cooperate with French producers, their first idea is to shoot a “biography” based on confused memories of an old secretary/chamberlain of Eduard Daladier about the background of the Munich agreement. Yet before start of the shooting, the French actor representing the chamberlain falls down with a serious condition, thus they substitute the character with a French speaking parrot (everything else staying the same, i.e. it lived with Daladier).

They schedule to shoot the movie for two months, the first month in the Czech republic, the second month in France. Soon after start, the actor portraying the main character (a journalist interviewing the parrot) develops allergy to feather and later is unable to continue shooting at all. They have to use various workarounds to create the illusion that the actual actor and the parrot are acting together. It seems that problems of the main actor could be caused by the Munich topic itself, so they start digging in the topic and present an alternative interpretation of the Munich agreement and they’d like to somehow insert it into the originally comedy movie.

The shooting is encountering many other troubles, which climax when the director realizes the French cooperation was just a trick of the producer to raise more money for the movie. Unfortunately, he was not successful – so they are acutely missing money. They tell to the rest of the team they were deceived by the French party and some of the more pissed off members of the team demonstrate their hatred on the French parrot and his French teacher/manager. Finishing the movie is heavily jeopardized and only few team-members continue.

What is more, one of the actors had a fatal car accident and so the movie makers can communicate to public that they can’t finish the movie because of his dead (although it was clear they won’t finish it anyway). And that’s the happy end!

Characters

In the movie

  • Jacque the parrot
  • the journalist
  • French ambassador/deputy

In the crew

  • director
  • producer
  • script author
  • film manager
  • main actor
  • genius propman
  • technicians
  • other actors

Topics

  • talking animal as unheeded witness of history
    • IMO an original idea
  • illusion in media and movies
    • fake parrot’s excrement
    • fake parrot, actor doubles, very minimalistic stage set
    • fake bunker from WW II
  • fundraising via illusion
    • alleged cooperation with France in order to get subsidy from EU
  • ephemeral nature of news
    • one day parrot, second day a celebrity being arrested
  • Czech attitude to Munich agreement
    • betrayed by French government
  • alternative interpretations of Munich agreement
    • ingenious diplomatic move of president Beneš
    • based on a book of Jan Tesař
  • tension between social classes/nationalities
    • Czech vs French
    • film management (director, producer, manager) vs film technicians/actors (parrot’s agent demands specific working conditions)
    • government vs ordinary people (diplomacy, mobilisation)
  • self-reference,, non-linearity, recursion
    • Polski film, Trhák
  • non-linearity
    • Pulp Fiction
  • relation of a man and animal
  • exaggeration of typical movie pathos
    • original movie plot is summarized at the end of the real movie in few storyboard pictures
  • pseudo documentary
    • we don’t know who is it shooting actually
    • sometimes interviews with staff
  • mystification
    • the poster says nothing, real director interviews indicates real investigation of the Munich agreement topic
    • the name of the movie is self-referential