Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos spend an hour letting a shambling carpenter and a deaf old widow get used to each other, then show what a whole town’s cowardice does to them. Patient, funny, and finally terrible. We would send a stranger to see it.
Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos, working from Ladislav Grosman’s novel, set out to show how a decent and weak man becomes part of a crime without ever deciding to. That is a large ambition for a film about a button shop, and they get there by refusing to hurry. For a good hour The Shop on Main Street is close to comedy. Then it is something else, and it is one of the few films on this subject we would tell a stranger to see.
Jozef Kroner plays Tono Brtko as a man who has never won an argument in his life. He shuffles, he scratches, he says yes when he means no, and when his brother-in-law hands him another man’s shop he protests for about as long as it takes to pour a drink. František Zvarík makes Kolkocký a loud, well-fed bully who is enjoying his uniform, and Hana Slivková’s Evelyna sees the shop the way she sees everything, as money she has not yet been given. The film is clear-eyed about all three and cruel to none of them.
Ida Kamińska is the reason the film works. Her Rozalia Lautmannová hears almost nothing, misreads everything, and treats the stranger who has been installed in her shop as a slightly slow young man who needs feeding. Kroner tries to explain the law to her and gets a plate of soup. She shows him the ledger, the drawers of buttons, the empty till, and he sits there with his cap in his hands. Kamińska plays her with a small, busy dignity, and the scenes of the two of them in the shop, saying nothing much, are the heart of the film.
Vladimír Novotný shoots the square in a hard, bright black and white, the sun flat on the cobbles and the Guard’s flags, and the shop as a dim grey room lit from one window. The difference matters: outside is where the town performs, inside is where two people eat lunch. Karel Škvor’s tower goes up plank by plank in the background of scene after scene, the town’s only construction project, and nobody needs to say what it is for. Zdeněk Liška gives the Sunday promenade a brass-band waltz, and when the tune comes back later it does not sound the same. Jaromír Janáček holds the shop scenes long and cuts to the loudspeaker in the square when he wants to remind us where we are.
Not everything lands. There are dream sequences, shot soft and bleached, in which Tono and Rozalia stroll arm in arm in their Sunday best, and they tip toward the whimsical in a film that has no need of it. Kolkocký’s scenes lean on the actor’s bulk and volume more than on anything written. And the tower is a symbol of the kind that stands in the square and asks to be noticed. The reviews so far rate it well below where we do; we think they have taken the slow first hour for slackness. Without it the last day would be melodrama.
The final movement takes place over a single day, and we will not describe it. We were frightened for two people in a button shop in a way no thriller has managed, and we knew exactly why: the film had spent an hour letting us watch them eat, and argue about the ledger, and wear their good clothes. When the fear arrived it had somewhere to go. We sat through the last twenty minutes without moving and were some time getting up afterwards.
Most films about this period go to the ghetto or the camp and ask us to grieve. This one stays on one street and asks a worse question, which is what we would have done with the paper in our hand and the drink in front of us. Kroner never asks for sympathy and never quite loses it. Kadár and Klos hold him to account and do not sneer.
See it, and see it with someone, because you will want to talk. It runs 128 minutes and carries a 15 certificate, and the first hour is gentler than the second.
