Forever Crossing the Rubicon: Alexandra Makarová’s Perla
Alexandra Makarová’s Perla (2025), winner of the inaugural FIPRESCI award at the 35th IFF Art Film, Košice, offers an insightful, complexly visualised analysis of European émigré experience. Although it precisely dates and locates its narrative’s historical and geographical borders (Czechoslovakia in 1968 – Austria in 1990), Makarová’s second feature will resonate widely in a contemporary geopolitical moment riven by militarily enforced mass migration within Europe and elsewhere.
13 years after fleeing the 1968 Soviet invasion of her native Czechoslovakia, titular protagonist Perla (Rebeka Poláková) seems set to achieve personal and professional security within her adopted Austria. Her career as a painter attracts increasing international interest and a romantic relationship with Josef (Simon Schwarz), a wealthy Viennese collector, offers emotional security and a surrogate father for prepubescent daughter, Julia (Carmen Diego). But Perla’s past intervenes unexpectedly. Julia’s father, Andrej (Noel Czuczor), newly released from political imprisonment in Czechoslovakia, tracks Perla down and claims to be terminally ill. Despite—or possibly due to—the dangers attached to returning home, she persuades Josef and Julia to share her clandestine parting of the Iron Curtain, a journey that plunges her hard-won physical and political freedom back into doubt.
As its title suggests, Perla functions as an intimate character portrait. Yet much of its richness stems from the ways in which Makarová’s writing and direction, lead actor Alexandra Makarová’s performance and DoP Georg Weiss’s lensing frequently combine to paint a central protagonist who provokes perplexity as much as sympathy, whether for the movie’s other characters or its real-life audience. This effect is part-traceable to Makarová’s commercially adroit adoption of multiple generic templates. Cold War thriller (the isolated dissident who pits themselves against the mighty nation state), film noir (an alluring-because-ambiguous central female protagonist) and melodrama (couples and families facing unexpected and impossible emotional dilemmas) are all discernible influences.
More uniquely and innovatively yet, Perla also depicts émigré experience as an especially complex and confusing state of being. While refusing its central character’s injunction that “I don’t want to talk about the past,” the film takes conspicuous care to qualify the comprehensiveness and clarity of what it reveals of her past and present-day lives. Multiple key scenes are blocked so as to obscure Perla’s face from clear view (whether our own or that of Julia, Josef and/or Andrej). The vital conversation during which Perla informs Josef of Julia’s true parentage is seen but not heard; conversely, in an equally pivotal flashback that possibly depicts Julia’s conception, that putative event is heard but not seen. Ultimately, Perla accepts and echoes its titular protagonist’s final-act protestation that: “You have no idea who I am!” Never fully understood or accepted in her new land and no longer so in her native one, Perla is a figure who distils the peculiarities and precarities of émigré existence and experience more generally.
Such ideas resonate while watching Perla because the film communicates them in highly cinematic ways. As befits a movie about a painter (and, indeed, one shown building her own picture frames), Perla’s shot compositions are meticulous throughout. In particular, they regularly favour frame-within-frame imagery, generally achieved through use of doorways and mirrors. Mirror-based shots variously associate émigrés and their interpersonal relationships with ideas of deception (Perla’s real and reflected faces both visible when Josef probes her residual feelings for Andrej) and doubled personalities and pasts (Perla reflected within an elevator’s mirrored interior as she resolves to extend her stay in Czechoslovakia without Josef and Julia’s consent).
Meanwhile, doorway-based shots emphasise that such negative sensations and associations stem not from Perla’s émigré identity and status but from the widespread misunderstanding and mistreatment these attract from those who populate her old and new lives alike. It’s no coincidence that Perla’s first and last onscreen appearances both see her approaching a Viennese apartment doorway unsure of the welcome (if any) awaiting behind it. Moreover, numerous scenes in between those two junctures also transform mundane processes of entering or exiting a doorway into symbolic sources of narrative, emotional and political tension: Perla delivering her paintings to a birthday party and only belatedly being invited to form “part of the gift”; a resentful Czechoslovakian friend refusing to let her enter the former’s home; the proverbial Knock at the Door that announces the Czechoslovak secret police’s arrival.
In such ways, Perla proposes not only the difficulty of comprehending the nature and consequences of émigré experience and identity but also that this challenge often defeats émigrés themselves. The film explains this phenomenon by presenting its central character as a woman unable ever to complete the journey she started following the Prague Spring. Thirteen years later, Perla hangs in a state of permanent cultural and psychological suspension, existing neither ‘There’ nor ‘Here’, ‘Then’ nor ‘Now’. When she tells Andrej that “I want to go home,” he cruelly taunts her that “You already are.” She longs not only to protect her liberty, but also to be liberated from that longing; she fears, yet also flirts with, capture by the Czechoslovakian state (“I could finally get it over with”).
Perla argues that we therefore cannot definitively know its central character, or any other real-life émigré, because she and they are fundamentally uncertain too: their former lives are never fully departed and their new ones never fully arrived at. The best we can hope to do is to live humanely within our limited capacity for understanding. As late-twentieth-century Europe’s émigré generations are succeeded by a present-day one created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this film’s cross-border festival and commercial distribution journey and the welcomes it receives on its travels are politically as well as cinematically meaningful matters.
Jonathan Murray
©FIPRESCI 2025