A man of rare intellect and risky irony, an essayist and playwright, a dissident and an outstanding politician – the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel has tried his hand at moviemaking.

­His debut drama Leaving has been presented at the Moscow International Film Festival, vying for the top honor of the Golden St George award.

For Václav Havel to direct a film is, in his own words, rather symbolic. As a child, the future president wanted to become a film director. His uncle was closely linked to the development of Czechoslovakian film, building up the industry during the First Republic. “Originally, and actually for my entire life, I wanted to be primarily a filmmaker,” Havel was quoted as saying.

His intimate drama relates to an experience which Havel has gone through himself – the loss of power. However, following in the footsteps of the author of The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov, Havel could have also defined his debut drama Leaving as a comedy.

A lifelong admirer of the theater of the absurd, Havel wrote the first version of his play Leaving in the summer of 1989, before the changes that occurred in November, which placed him in the highest office of the Czech state, for a long time. Between 1989 and 2003 he was the Czechoslovakian and later the Czech president.

Václav Havel on the set of Leaving (image from moscowfilmfestival.ru)

­Leaving focuses on Dr. Vilém Rieger who was a chancellor for many years and then ousted from office. His entire world fell apart and, like Madame Ranevskaya who, entangled with debt, loses her beloved cherry orchard, the politician must move out of his government villa, which has over the years become his castle. He must undergo a stream of idiotic routine procedures separating the government’s things from his private things.

Radical change is fraught with a number of unpleasant revelations. The chancellor’s  secretary turns out to be a foolish snake, while Rieger’s eldest daughter – like King Lear’s Goneril whose love is "A love that makes breath poor and speech unable" – simply backs away from her original intention to have her father live with her after his “kingdom” is taken away from him.

One of the leading roles in the film by the maverick film director – that of Rieger’s beautiful girlfriend Irena – is played by Havel’s wife, Dagmar Havlova, who presented the film in Moscow.

Havel's wife, actress Dagmar Havlova, plays one of the leading roles in Leaving

­She said that her husband’s film was made with sincerity and Havel’s signature sense of humor.

“In his political life he had to put his irony aside, along with other traits of character that revealed his personality.”

A man of revolutionary change, Havel’s aim in office was to replace the old totalitarian system with the new laws of freedom, democracy and human rights. However, shooting his first feature film, one of the world’s top intellectuals – Havel – kept repeating that he actually did not know how to go about it.

“This evoked the feeling in everybody that he needs help. This led to such a collective effort, such volition to please the director, as I have never seen on another shoot. It was also obvious that this work made him happy, and this also motivated us. Moreover, we also knew that he was not going to shoot another film, that this was his ‘once is enough’, so we fell all over ourselves in order to satisfy him. And I am not talking about just the actors. I saw this in the entire crew. I have never worked with a director who could impose his will so profoundly and yet so imperceptibly, as director Havel,” one of the actors, Jiří Macháček, was quoted as saying.

“I have been terrified by a world that is losing its sense of humor”, Czech writer Milan Kundera, the author of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting once said.  

Havel’s Leaving is a Chekhovian collage of life which draws on memory and irony, with a nostalgic twist.

­Valeria Paikova, RT