Film review: ‘Charlatan’ takes a too-uncritical look at a folk healer

Mikolášek claims to have treated over 5 million people is his career, many who lined up to wait for hours outside his rural house while others sent filled glass bottles in the mail.

The story never looks at the elephant in the room — whether or not there was any value at all to his intense urine gazing and homemade herbal potions. Instead he is shown curing his sister’s gangrene with a salve of ground leaves, predicting the exact day someone will die just by looking at them, and going head-to-head with a German medical doctor and making more accurate diagnoses.

Religion is downplayed, but at one point Mikolášek tells an interrogator that faith is half the cure. The old woman (Jaroslava Pokorná) who taught Mikolášek stressed the importance of daily prayer for the healer, and makes some mention of divine gifts and performing miracles.

The people in the film who question whether Mikolášek is doing more harm than good with his potions are admittedly black uniformed Nazi Gestapo agents and, later, hard-line pro-Stalin communists. This does make Mikolášek seem to be the victim of intolerance, but it still asks the audience to set aside medical science and accept faith-based folk medicine as something valid.

Much of the film’s focus is shifted instead to Mikolášek’s romantic relationship with his assistant, František (Slovak actor Juraj Loj), who is equally unqualified in medicine. The relationship causes Mikolášek some internal turmoil, symbolized in the film by him kneeling on sharp rocks to pray after their first romantic encounter. (Male romantic relationships were illegal in Czechoslovakia at the time.)

The subject of Mikolášek’s patients also comes up. The film starts with the 1957 death of Czechoslovak communist leader Antonín Zápotocký, whom he treated. This leaves Mikolášek without any friends in high places to protect him. Later it is revealed he also treated Nazi leader Martin Borman. This seems to be an attempt to depict Mikolášek as a flawed hero who took his all-patients-are-equal idea perhaps a bridge too far.

The latter part of the film is framed around a court case, which, while shown as a communist-era sham trail, is also frustrating underdeveloped leaving far more questions than answers.

The cinematography and the production design are big pluses for the film. In the scenes set in the 1950s, everything is drab and unsaturated. Blues and blacks predominate the cold scheme, and urine adds the only warm color. A claustrophobic feel is created by often having some blurred object in the foreground, blocking a proper view. Sharp shadows create an expressionist look as Mikolášek gets deeper into trouble.

Scenes between the wars are more vibrant and colorful, with greens and yellows and lots of sunshine, and unobstructed vistas.

The audience in the end is left to judge the main characters, balancing the good they did against the bad, but that only works of the entire urine gazing project did anybody any good at all.