91Èȱ¬

The exceptionally cute infant of the title is almost certainly the reason why "Kolya" won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1997. However, Zdenek Sverák's reluctant guardian is the only character of substance in this otherwise unchallenging confection set in a Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia. Lead actor Sverák also penned the film. Its director, Jan Sverák, is his son.

The 55-year-old bachelor Louka is a former cellist with the Czech Philharmonic reduced to playing at funerals and struggling with debt. An opportunity to settle up drops him in big trouble when a marriage of convenience sees his would-be wife skipping the country for a former lover. This leaves him at the mercy of the police (which fact provides some under-exploited tension to the film) but his biggest concern is little Kolya (Chalimon), the five-year-old son the escaping woman leaves behind.

With the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia coming to an end, the changes in Louka are dimly paralleled by the political events of 1988, but ambiguously so. His evident distaste for children is compounded by the fact that Kolya is Russian. Clumsy attempts to speak the detested language of the occupiers is a source of much of the film's humour, though the difference between the two Slavic languages is somewhat lost in the English translation.

Its traditional Czech irreverence is a relief to the mawkishness of Kolya blubbering in the bathtub, but the stickier sentiment triumphs in a predictable and unsatisfying resolution that sees the belligerent old bachelor plumping for fatherhood as the Republic finds its feet.