REVIEW: Django tells the story of Jando better than the history of the Olympics

They spent forty filming days together, and then the screenwriter, cameraman and director together with the editor Šárka Sklenářová put together one hundred and ten film minutes from recorded and archival materials, in which excerpts from forty songs, both the most famous and the lesser known, will be heard.

Janda is not only one of the most prominent figures of Czech popular music, he is also a very charismatic man, in whose company, even if only through the screen, it is pleasant to spend almost two hours. And his lifelong passions, music and the guitar, are of course an integral part of his personality.

Django’s (nicknamed Janda in 1968 during his stay in France, where his surname was hacked) life was accompanied by great successes, moments of happiness and great painful disappointments, especially from the departure of close people. Where the camera follows him outside the lights of the ramps is also where the film is at its strongest. Especially the beautiful relationship with daughter Marta or the friendly one with manager Miloš Zapletal bring funny and naturally touching moments.

REVIEW: Distinctive songs, honest sound and something extra. That’s the 60-year-old Olympic

Culture

Taking care of the youngest daughters will remind you how differently one perceives children at a young age and then at a later age. Janda is open, insightful and honest about, for example, the huge age difference between him and his current wife.

He does not avoid the fate of the band during the period of normalization or the sometimes difficult but clearly resolute decision about the members of Olympik, many of whom were replaced.

He completely avoided only the younger brother Slávek (frontman of the rock group Abraxas), which is a shame, because it somewhat detracts from his and the author’s efforts to seem truthful and completely sincere.

The history of the Olympics is, of course, inseparable from Janda, but in its mapping, Malířová Špátová failed to find and maintain a solid line, to tell something more substantial than the passage of time.

These passages are sketchy, jumping between eras and individual characters, from real names to nicknames. Only a connoisseur of the entire sixty years of the band can orient themselves well, but he probably won’t learn anything new.

The music is great, but the concerts seem almost identical to each other. It would be worth more to point out, for example, the famous twenty years of the Olympics in Prague’s Lucerne in 1983, which was broadcast by Czechoslovak Television and can still be seen on YouTube today.

Even so, it is pleasant to go back to the history of the most popular Czech rock band in archival footage and get to know, for example, young František Ringo Čech or Jiří Korn.

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Nestor of the Czech big beat Petr Janda remembers

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