Citizen Havel by Pavel Koutecký & Miroslav Janek

Filmed over ten years and subsequently edited during almost five years, Citizen Havel constitutes one of the most challenging political biopic ever made in the documentary field. The fact that we are not dealing here with the head of a powerful nation, but simply the first President of a newly born country, the Czech Republic, that many would have difficulties to locate on the map of Europe, doesn’t make the film less captivating. Quite the contrary. Through a humoristic, irreverent, and down to earth portrait of a man, the intelligent documentary by Pavel Koutecký (who happened to be a close friend of Václav Havel) succeeds to be –with simplicity and elegance- amazingly multi-layered and multi-topical.

Thanks to its amplitude, Citizen Havel not only shows the complex issues of a country’s very specific historical context – the transition from a communist regime to a possible democracy, but also captures the spirit of the era. A moment in time, in the nineties, when the great hopes created by the Velvet Revolution have given way to the realization of the limits of freedom for a small nation. Implementing a true participative democracy is actually not only very difficult but far less rewarding and more trivial than it may sound like. Protocol often takes over great thinking.

This is a sort of tragicomedy on governing we are witnessing. The play has some Chekhovian accents; still it actually could have been written by the main protagonist himself. Before entering the castle of the tiny kingdom indeed, Václav Havel hadn’t exactly followed the traditional career plan designed at ambitious politicians. Playwright, former political dissident (one of the three spokesmen for Charter 77) and influential thinker, Havel came to power quite reluctantly, and primarily thanks to the iconic status he acquired during the 1989 events. In a way –and the documentary indirectly tackles the consequences of that, he was willingly designated for presidency by the true politicians, who thought they could easily manage with him. Eventually, after the split of Czechoslovakia in 1992, he firmly maintained his position as President of the Czech Republic until 2003. Amusingly, Havel’s longevity is not due to his skills in manoeuvring nor to the depth of its political essays, but to his natural and irrational level of popularity among his fellow citizens. He’s just become one of these rock stars that he used to admire himself so much, and still does - one episode features a concert of the ‘Rolling Stones’ in Prague in 1995, followed by a lunch at the presidential castle together with Mick Jagger & co.

In a way - and the film includes numerous illustrations of this state of things, the story of Havel’s presidency is one of complete misunderstanding between the king and his people. It’s quite ironic to note that the writer of one of the most significant political essays of the 20th century, The Power of the Powerless (1978) – that basically advocates for changes in society to come from grassroots’ individual actions, had to face the general and commonly accepted idea that only him could make a change for the country. As a consequence, his political action mostly resumes in claiming that his charisma alone can’t help against the relative insignificance of Prague on the global agenda and that Czechs should rather count on themselves. The powerless of the powerful…

After two hours of family routine, day-to-day politics and intense dramatic moments, the viewer feels surely emotionally attached to the person of Havel, but also very much intellectually questioned. One cannot help but to end up with mixed feelings on the governing of Václav Havel, and more generally on the broad topic of democracy. Was he ultimately a good President? And wasn’t his high concerns on trying to teach a model of active citizenship participation going against the efficiency of the results? After all, was it really what the Czechs were expecting? And if even Havel failed to achieve what many of his generation envisioned and dreamt of, who would be capable of making it real? Almost twenty years after the Berlin Wall fell, a strong sense of disillusionment fills the air.

Still, at a time which gives birth to George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin, Nicolas Sarkozy and others, and is marked by a return of autocracy among the most advanced democracies, the struggle against the stream, even clumsy, even of men like Václav Havel is to be praised and followed.

Matthieu Darras