Utz | Armin Mueller-Stahl, Brenda Fricker

Utz | Armin Mueller-Stahl, Brenda Fricker | Light as a feather yet extremely deep

vhs video:

Utz

	Utz Armin Mueller-Stahl, Brenda Fricker First Run Features, 2000 average customer review:based on 19 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

The world in miniature

In 'Utz' Chatwin has created an object that tempts yet resists definitive analysis. It resembles, in effect, a piece of the Meissen porcelain which is central to its concerns. At once exquisitely wrought, yet appealing to coarser interests, it is a paradoxical synthesis of the refined and the grotesque.
*
It is, in a sense, a piece of travel writing - the travel is not merely geographical, but also through time and through the life of the eponymous protagonist. The minor characters are sparkling caricatures, Chatwin's gleaming words fashioning figures as charming, and as repulsive, as the variously described Meissen figurines. The narrator asks himself, and implicitly asks us too, how much and how little we see and learn of all of this, and how much we invent in our need to make the narrative, and perhaps the world with its baffling cast of beings, coherent and meaningful.
*
Chatwin's prose possesses grace and clarity. It supports a multitude of learned references effortlessly. The tone has hints of the great European classics, even 'The Magic Mountain' (this being Utz's intended reading on his first venture away from Communist Czechoslovakia), but remains light and readable. Yet this supple style allows Chatwin to speculate over the length of Utz's virile member, and over his fetish for gargantuan divas. It ranges easily from the personal to the political. The style itself is a worthy object for a fetishist, and in its precision and erudition suggests that the author himself finds words his fetish.
*
The book entertains a feast of ideas - the role of art in at once defeating and heightening fears of death and aging; the sublimation of the desire for physical beauty; the tension between the private and political (was Utz, after all, a spy, or, at the least, a conduit for stolen works of art to be sold in the West for the profit of the Czech state); the fragility and tenacity of acquaintance and friendship; the role of fantasy in lives constantly moulded by hard realities.
*
All of this is layered within 150 odd pages. What might be said to be missing is the overt portrayal of a complex character - we see Utz, and his offsiders, and indeed Chatwin himself, glancingly. But such glimpses only help to inspire a wonder for the world and all its inexplicable variety - and, for me, for a book to foster such inspiration is a great achievement.
*
A truly beautiful work of art.

for more information click here

Light as a feather yet extremely deep

Bruce Chatwin was dying in the late 1980s of a mystery disease, he claimed originating from a rare Chinese fungus. It was subsequently confirmed to be AIDS. Utz emerged out of these inauspicious circumstances. Chatwin explained the thinking behind Utz in a letter to his friend, Cary Welch, whilst confined to his bed due to ill health: 'I had thought I'd use the time to read and re-read all the great Russian novels. Instead, hardly able to hold a pen, I launched forth on my story: A tale of Marxist Czechoslovakia conceived in the spirit and style or the Rococo'.

As ever, Chatwin could sum up the spirit of his own novels in a few words better than anyone else. But while Utz is certainly ornate, it is not florid and insubstantial like much of the art that the term Rococo is applied to. Utz is a porcelain collector who collects under the shadow of Communist repression which prohibits private ownership of property. The story is said to be based on Chatwin's encounter with Dr Rudolph Just, a businessman and passionate collecter of glass, silver and Meissen who married his housekeeper.

The story is ostentiably about the collection of porcelain as an escape from political repression. But within its few pages, the novel explores a great many more themes. Great art as a beacon of hope, the survival of the characters of Old Europe - resolutely immune to political indoctrination, as manifested in the character of Marta, Utz'z housekeeper whom he marries towareds the end of the novel, the Jewish dimension (Utz is partly Jewish) - the notion of collecting as a subversive activity, worshipping idols over God. The pretty little figurines in Utz seem to take over a life of their own as they become imbued with the worries and burdens of the characters. And as a backdrop to all of this, Chatwin penetrates deep into the spirit of Communist Prague better than almost any other novelist who has tried.

A gem of a novel.

for more information click here

To live in artistic rapture!

Armin Muller Stahl made a tour de force acting as the patience collector. Art against fashion; cosmic breathe against fashion concerns. These figures are a real visual feast.

The amazing dialogues , the assertive narrative pulse and the ravishing performance of Stahl deserved for him the Best Actor Award in Cannes 1992.

If you are a artwork collector as I do, acquire this unusual movie.

A delightful novel

In this witty and delightful novel the author portrays a character called Kaspar Joachim Utz, an unconventional collector of Meissen porcelain. Despite all efforts to suppress individualism the communist regime of the late 1960s Czechoslovakia allowed Utz to keep a spectacular private collection of porcelain amounting to more than a thousand pieces, all crammed in a small two-roomed flat in Prague. The account of how Utz built up his collection is truly moving and the humour with which Mr Chatwin describes his peregrinations across Europe is irresistible. Wars, pogroms and revolutions offer excellent opportunities for the collector, Utz remarks ironically!
The novel is a sharp account of the history of Middle Europe from the 1850s to the Prague Spring in 1969, of the history of the Meissen porcelain production, of the absurdities of communism and also of the Czech spirit of which Mr Chatwin is a very keen observer.

for more information click here

Exquisite

An exquisite novel, but Alas, too short!

And yet, it conjures unforgettable characters and evokes Prague in a way that makes you recognize it even if you've never been there.

It isn't just the main characters that are memorable, but all of the characters in this story, no matter how small a space they take up. Characters such as Orlik, the paleontologist who studies house-flies and who asked the narrator to examine Dutch and Flemish still-lifes of the seventeenth century "to check whether or not there was a fly in them", or the temperamentful ex-soprano who lived under Utz's apartment, or the man whose job was emptying garbage trucks, but who spoke English and was a writer, or the Ludvik and Zitek, other "garbage collectors" who were actually poets, writers, philosophers and out-of-work actors.

While most of the characters in the book seem unfazed by the restrictions imposed upon them by the regime in former Czechoslovakia, they do, however, express themselves in constantly enigmatic terms such as "maybe yes, maybe no", "maybe it is, maybe it is not", "maybe they are alive, maybe they are not"... whether that is the only deference to circumspection they are willing to offer, or whether it is
due to a need to inject mystery into their lives to compensate for its grimness and predictability, we do not know for sure..

The world of the story seems divided into several "parallel universes" that coexist side-by-side, that of the characters versus that of the figurines, whom "Utz", the protagonist, regards as living entities, as well as that of the communist regime versus the people, who find ways to navigate around it with the least confrontation and maximum benefit possible.

The question of the fate of the collection remains unanswered in the end, with the narrator offering a wild guess that is neither confirmed nor denied. The story ends at the sight of the one character that could give him the answers. We, however, do not learn what those answers are.

Maybe because the uncertainty of a "maybe-maybe not" is the only answer there is?

There is, however, one certainty about this book: its characters shall remain with you for a long time after you put it down.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

products you might be interested in