EVERYTHING I LIKE

Martin Sulik, noted for his treatment of particular human dilemmas, isolation and emotional redemption, has taken as his most recent hero an ordinary man with extraordinary problems. Thomas, 38 and divorced, remains in contact with his former wife and teenage son. He is devoted, in his fashion, to his aged parents. He is unemployed but lacks the inner motivation to change his life. Indeed, he is more concerned with other people's lives. But observing and recording the fragments of other lives gives him no clues to his own existence: they become mere, biazzare splinters of something he cannot envision as a whole. He has farcical conflicts with his ex-wife; his son presents him with problems he cannot begin to solve; and his parents demand too much from him. Unexpectedly, he meets a young English woman who offers him a chance to escape. Set in modern Bratislava, the film relates a personal situation to larger social issues at work in Czechoslovakia, giving an added richness to the narrative. Sulik has expertly captured the state of mind of a man in midlife crisis, with all its ridiculousness and its pain. In Slovak with English subtitiles.