There are so many ways for a film like writer/director Ondrej Provaznik’s “Broken Voices” to go wrong. Based on the infamous real-life Bambini di Praga case in which a Czech choir director was convicted of sexually abusing almost two dozen young girls, it’s a largely restrained yet no less unsettling exploration of how an acclaimed choir becomes a place of widespread abuse of children.
The film, which premiered on Sunday at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, tells an inescapably painful story and must walk a very fine line between authentically capturing the reality of horrifying situations like this while also not falling into being exploitative or, perhaps even worse, turning what happened into something exceptional.
What makes Provaznik’s film most effective, beyond just the care it shows to its young characters and the way it keeps their humanity at the forefront, is the fact that its story, no matter how disquieting it gets, is also frighteningly ordinary. The context is specific and detailed, yet the playbook is alarmingly familiar in how abuse comes not from random strangers supposedly lurking in the shadows, but the people who are known to all around them.
It’s a simple, devastating truth that the film faces head-on, creating a constant pit in the stomach as the impending abuse feels both completely avoidable and, conversely, tragically inevitable when no one can be trusted to look after the children. In this regard, it feels as though Damien Chazelle’s fantastic 2014 film “Whiplash” has been crossed with Kitty Green’s underappreciated “The Assistant.” Though thankfully not as visceral as the former and unfortunately never quite as nuanced as the latter, “Broken Voices” is still a thoughtful portrait that ends up somewhere between the two. It’s delicate in some moments yet devastating in others, doing justice to a true story.
The film begins in the 1990s with the young Karolina (Kateřina Falbrová) as she sneaks into a rehearsal to watch her sister Lucie (Maya Kintera) sing as part of the world-renowned Czech choir Bambini di Praga. As we get gently immersed in their sibling dynamics, defined by both love for the other as well as occasional jealousy, we also begin to get glimpses of the choir and the community that feels caught in its orbit.
The group, which is led by Choirmaster Vit Macha (Juraj Loj), is repeatedly portrayed as a point of pride for the adults. The way everyone is enamored with the prospect of their kid becoming a part of the traveling choir, whose next tour is to the United States, only makes it that much more quietly distressing to see how nobody seems to be thinking of the children themselves. When Karolina is invited to be part of the main choir and then goes to an extended remote rehearsal retreat along with the rest of the group, the alarm bells that were already going off in the back of your mind grow louder and louder.
Crucially, Provaznik never overplays his hand in exploring this dynamic, letting potent, pointed little details accumulate until everything comes crashing down. The most quietly annihilating moment comes early on when we learn of how Karolina and Lucie are warned about not taking a supposedly dangerous path through the woods to their home. It’s something the film returns to multiple times, both because it is a moment where the two girls (of course going down the path anyway) are experiencing joy together and also to create a juxtaposition with the most pressing threat that exists in their world.
That threat is not the one they’ve been warned about; instead, it comes bearing a smile and promises of how great the girls are. It wins their otherwise caring parents over, which makes it that much more pernicious.
There are so many signs seemingly ignored by adults who should have noticed them, the most disquieting one involving a jacket being left behind in a room. That is precisely the point: People see what they want to see. They compartmentalize away genuinely concerning details because it comes from someone close to them, choosing to be on guard against the easier to swallow, more abstract threats instead.
This all makes “Broken Voices” a delicate, damning indictment of the way abuse consumes not just the choir group in this case, but any community. It’s one of those incisive, more sociologically-driven films that ends up being described as a long-overdue reckoning for whatever it turns its lens towards. However, while it certainly is deserving of this praise and benefits greatly from a layered debut performance by Falbrová, the more critical truth is that it reveals how this can happen anywhere when people look the other way.
Even as we get one glimpse of compassion from one of Karolina’s fellow choir members in an offer to hold her hand, which ends up informing the film’s shattering final frame, the tragedy comes from knowing this is not enough. The supposed adults in the room are only listening to the beautiful music and not the crushing pain beneath it.