“The right film for anyone willing to be as open-hearted as it is”

It is often easy for people to forget or take for granted that emotional transparency demands a lot of bravery, because it is nearly always certain that even the most sincere expressions of emotion are bound to go misunderstood by people who lack the imagination or empathy to be able to identify with experiences that perhaps they can not immediately identify with or relate to. 

With Chica Checa (a Spanish translation of “Czech Girl”), an expertly structured, tone-juggling, dual-faceted coming out story, Šimon Holý deserves the highest possible praise for fearlessly following his convictions and instincts in his commitment to making the film that he felt that this needed to be, trusting this to find the audience who needs this instead of trying to make a film to win over the unwinnable. 

An empty nest is always difficult for any mother to adjust to, but you could argue that Zdena, a postwoman living in a small Czech village, has a bit more on her plate than the average mother feeling sad about missing her kids. Zdena has been widowed for years, her mother is living in the last of her twilight years, and her son Lukas is living in France, where he has been working in a bank and living with a roommate. Sensing that these are, indeed, her mother’s final days, Zdena warns him that if he wants to see his grandma one last time, he should come home. Lukas makes the trip, and as he and Zdena visit his grandmother in the hospital, the first words out of her mouth are, “Have you called Helena?”

“Who is this Helena?” Lukas wonders aloud as he and Zdena drive back to her home. Well, it turns out Granny got this idea that Helena Vondráčková, a legendary Czech pop icon, should come to visit one last time, because her happiest memory is of Helena performing at her agricultural cooperative. Lukas has a solution: Grandma is already practically blind and deaf, so maybe Lukas could go in full drag as Helena and perform in her hospital? At first laughing it off as an unserious suggestion, Zdena becomes increasingly annoyed as he insists that this is worth considering, worried that the nursing staff would mistake him for being gay. “Mom, I am gay. And I don’t work for a bank, I’m a drag queen.” Well, there could definitely be worse spontaneous coming out strategies: if he was going to drop the “I’m gay” bomb, he might as well have dropped an even bigger and more shocking one to minimize the first, because Zdena is horrified, blurting an accusatory, “What else have you been hiding?”

Šimon Holý uses the rest of Chica Checa to study how mother and son close the distance between them, effortlessly letting its tone evolve, rooted primarily in comedy but letting the dramatic moments build their crescendo, often even within a single scene. Pavla Tomicová, in a second collaboration with Holý for which she had to fight because of his reluctance to repeat his casting decisions, proves that she was right to insist that the role should be hers, because every frame of her screentime, from the limitless variety in the expressions and reactions in her face to the chemistry that she builds with Jan Cina, confirms that the role had to be hers. And as for Cina, a winner of StarDance (the Czech version of Dancing with the Stars), and a graduate of the Music and Drama Department of the Prague Conservatory, lets his dancerly training, movement and actorly preparation take over to bring Chica Checa, Lukas’s drag persona, to life in the eventual performance of Helena Vondráčková’s “Dlouhá noc” (in English, “Long Night”). And despite obvious reverence for drag as a legitimate artform, Holý wisely uses Chica Checa’s drag appearances sparingly and when appropriate, preventing this from becoming a gimmick that overstays its welcome. Instead, Holý understands to highlight the comedic and dramatic abilities of his two very talented leads, staging scenes that build a relationship between Zdena and Lukas that feel like a real mother-son relationship, where scenes of conflict and bickering resolve in a natural, realistic way, rather than feeling like artificial, over-written ‘movie’ scenes. 

A superficial glance at Chica Checa may lead some to conclude that its stakes are low and predictable because of how quickly Zdena overcomes homophobia and accepts her son’s identities as a gay man and drag artist, but there are legitimate reasons why it is important that her ideological and emotional transformation develops the way that it does. Zdena’s initial revulsion and resistance to homosexuality and drag does not come from the place of deep-seated bigotry: she simply comes from a way of life where historically it has been difficult for queer people to live openly. Of course it is unfortunate that the beliefs that people are often raised to have are ones of hostility, but similarly, it is just as frequent that they have never had the opportunity to challenge their own beliefs, given how infrequent it is for them to have personally known an openly queer person. “There aren’t many people like you here,” a family friend tells Lukas at his grandmother’s funeral, and he corrects her, “There are. You’d be surprised.” In rural communities, queer people are hidden in plain sight, and many could live their lives believing that they haven’t actually known a person, when they have. Probably even more than one! 

As Lukas reveals himself to the people around him and Zdena, it is a relief to see that Šimon Holý understands that the reactions do not need to be contrived gasps and pearl-clutching. People respond with platitudes like, “Let everyone do what they want as long as they don’t hurt anyone,” which sound like cliches, but these are the things one will frequently hear in these situations nowadays, and Holý is simply accurately reading the room. It’s a very hopeful message, and one that can be very helpful to closeted people: coming out is still very scary for many closeted people, even in a time where each generation is more open-minded and less bothered by how you live your life. When you finally are able to summon the courage to take this difficult step, more often than not you’ll find that it isn’t that big a deal: sometimes even the people you come out to will find that they aren’t as bothered by it as they would have thought they would be. Zdena is frequently shown to be feeling very uncomfortable in these situations, and while there is an element of shame that she is still learning to overcome, it becomes clear that her awkwardness comes from the fear of seeing people potentially hurt her son; with every new interaction, you can see the progression of how Zdena is able to relax a little bit more.

Ultimately Zdena embraces her son, his career, and the life he has with his boyfriend, because she’s a mother who loves her son. When somebody praises her for being so unexpectedly open-minded, Zdena asks the person if they have children, continuing to explain, “When your kids grow up, you’ll feel the same. There is nothing we wouldn’t do for our children.” With no indication of a religious barrier or some other source of deep-seated bigotry, this is the natural evolution of how a mother loves her child, and often it is the non-conformity of their child, who they’re going to love regardless, that opens their eyes to the tastes, identities or lifestyles that they were simply ignorant of, and shows them their normality.

The history of queer cinema includes so many examples of films where coming out is a traumatic, miserable experience, where its protagonists are punished and suffer for it, and it is such a huge relief that Holý understands how times have changed, and what a contemporary coming out story looks and sounds like. And not only is this story more authentic, but its message of hope potentially has the power to empower, embolden, and encourage queer people to take this step and show their loved ones how rewarding it would be to allow themselves to let go of their prejudices and be the supportive pillars that they are needed to be. It’s difficult to even dream of how important this film could be for Czech children, teenagers, young adults, or even mature adults who haven’t felt safe enough to come out (or even for ones who already have), to hear and see a film like this in their own language. And though as much as this is a spirited love letter to Czech culture, the reach of Chica Checa doesn’t have to end there: Chica Checa is the right film for anyone willing to be as open-hearted as it is.