Jiri Weiss’ The Golden Fern is conventionally described
as a “fairy tale,” and the story is certainly rooted in the supernatural, but such
a label misrepresents the actual experience of watching the film, which is
often bracingly pained and violent. Jura, a shepherd, finds the titular plant
in the depths of the forest and brings it home, in turn summoning Lesanka, a
mysterious and beautiful woman who asks him to give it back, but ultimately stays
and becomes his wife. For a while the movie surrenders to dreamy romanticism,
but Jura is far pricklier than a conventionally bland hero, overly sensitive
for instance to any suggestion that he’s being laughed at, and one night takes
off for a binge, drunkenly signing up for a long stint in the army, allowed only
a cursory goodbye to Lesanka during which she gives him a shirt which she says
will shield him from harm. Thus magically equipped, he becomes a military hero
and is promoted to captain, but his desire to return home, and the machinations
of a superior’s calculating daughter, lead him through a series of challenges
at which he improbably succeeds (this element of the film, a staple of the folk
tale, offsets its flourishing adventurism with depictions of the grisly consequences
for those whom he outwits), but only to experience further frustration, and
then catastrophe. The film is certainly in part a veiled comment on class, the
venality of the military superiors emphasized at every stage: in exploiting poverty
and fallibility, in flagrantly failing to live up to promises made, in treating
enlisted men like playthings, or almost arbitrarily condemning then to death.
But it also suggests that one can escape and transcend such grim confines, albeit
perhaps only to escape into a different kind of despair, a lonelier and more
mysterious one.
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