Summary
One of the most popular titles in Václav Vorlíček’s extensive filmography remains Jak utopit dr. Mráčka aneb Konec vodníků v Čechách (How to Drown Dr Mráček or The End of Water Sprites in Bohemia), a 1974 fantasy comedy. As well as the director’s favourite collaborator Miloš Macourek, the author of the book on which it was based, Petr Markov also contributed to the screenplay. In the contemporary fairy tale the titular hero – the young lawyer Jindřich Mráček (Jaromír Hanzlík) – attempts conscientiously to find new, more dignified and healthy accommodation for a family living in a damp house on Prague’s Kampa. He has no idea that they are water sprites, who are not at all enthused by the idea of a dry prefab apartment building. The head of the family Mr. Wasserman (Miloš Kopecký) decides to get rid of the persistent official. This is complicated, however, by the romance growing between Jindřich and his niece Jana (Libuše Šafránková). An interesting aspect of the colourful story is the fact that there are ethnic and social differences within the water sprite community: Wasserman, his wife Matylda (Míla Myslíková) and their spoiled daughter Polly are “bourgeois” nobs but rely on the assistance of their poor, hard-working relatives the Vodičkovýs. Wasserman has further problems with a negative assessment of the standards of the moribund domestic water sprite community, even earning reprimands at a conference in Hamburg… After Dívka na koštěti (The Girl on the Broom, 1971) it was another genre picture in which the Vorlíček-Macourek double-act looked at a strongly idealised present through fairy tale creatures. Water sprites replace the staff at a school of wizardry but this time the narrative is based on the adversity that divides a “mixed” couple: a human young man and a “different” girl. Again the loss of magical powers plays a role. In order to remain in the human world, the young witch Saxana needed a draught of sage. The water sprite Jana must choose between two tried and tested options: sex or the ingestion or transfusion of (any non-sprite) blood. Despite the playful nature of this motif (which is also applied to West German youths meant to revive the moribund Czech water sprite population), it is typical of 1970s cinematography: “disenchantment” is after all also a curious form of normalisation.
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