Women In Temptation “Zeny v pokuseni” (Jiri Vejdelek, 2010): Czech Republic

Viewed by: Demi Mellett. Viewed at the: Santa Barbara Film Festival 2011

Women In Temptation was by far the funniest movie I saw at the Santa Barbara Film festival this year. This movie was compared to Sex and the City and in a way it is just like it in the sense that it revolves around the thoughts of sex and relationships. The plot consists of a family of three, a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter. All three have relationship problems and this story portrays what they go through in finding themselves and at the same time, the right guy. Through the movie there are some sad occurances, but the director continues to keep the movie on an upbeat note.

The begining of the movie starts with couples counseling. The mother of the family, Helena played by Lenka Vlasáková, is counseling couples through their ludicrous problems, while in turn she has just been left by her husband for a younger woman. Helena makes the mistake of thinking her husband will come back to her like many other women do after being left, hence she sits around waiting for him to come home. Helena’s waiting around for her husband to come back does not work for her and it starts effecting her negatively in every way possible. Being upset for example, Helena goes through the fridge in the middle of the night and eats all of its contents.

Meanwhile Helena’s daughter Laura, played by Veronika Kubarová, has a tendancy to go through boyfriends quite fast. Her newly found boyfriend, Jakub, played by Vojtech Dyk, is the longest relationship she’s been in recently and they have been getting along very well. Jakub is ready to take it to the next step with with Laura by moving in together, but Laura isn’ t quite ready for such a big step.

Vilma, Helena’s mother, played by Eliska Balzerová, shows up to help her daughter cope with being newly single. Vilma, although a grandmother, has got a young heart and uses men to get what she wants with her lively personality and flashy looks. Meanwhile, both Helena’s mother and daughter try to teach her how to flirt to find a new man. Helena never quite gets the hang of the flirting techniques they try to teach her and gets secretly set up by her daughter’s new boyfriend, Jakub. All of the women in the family go through trial and error with the men they are seeing and this film shows how time consuming having a love life can be for some people. The Director Jirí Vejdelek takes us on the comical journey through the lives of these three successful women and keeps n cheery vibe throughout the whole film.

The music was generally upbeat in this film and the different angles kept the focus of everone in the theater. The humor in this movie was also fantastic. Although this movie was excellent in my opinion and had an uplifting story line, at one point in the movie the subtitles were white as well as the background and it was very frusterating to not be able to read what was going on at such at vital moment in the story. Besides this, the film was amazing and I would highly reccomend it to anybody who loves to laugh.