Reviewed - Czech Dream: In the 1961 comedy Lover Come Back, Doris Day and Rock Hudson star as rival advertising executives caught up in a scheme to market an imaginary product named Vip. As the film progresses, demand soars and Rock is eventually forced to employ a mad scientist to create the mysterious entity.
In 2003 Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda, two Czech film-makers working with a grant from the Ministry of Culture, embarked on a similar plan with satirical purposes in mind. The imagined product is a supermarket named Czech Dream and, to test the public's inclination to read between the lines, it is advertised with such slogans as "Don't Come" and "Don't Go There". Initially the marketing executives are enthusiastic, but - in a display of hypocrisy striking even from people in this line of work - they eventually balk at the use of the phrase "you won't leave empty handed". Advertising something that doesn't exist is acceptable, but this, apparently, is plain dishonest.
Such moments enliven an exercise that could have seemed redundant in the era of Michael Moore and The Yes Men. The film-makers also profit from the surprising way their prank comes to be seen as a comment on the government's attempts to persuade the electorate to vote in favour of EU membership.
But the final half hour leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. The several thousand shoppers who turn up before a flapping banner on the supermarket's "opening day" are, for the most part, not the polo-necked young consumerists so frequently parodied in letters to this newspaper concerning Dundrum Town Centre. Many are elderly. Some are infirm. Most are working class. All seem, quite reasonably, drawn there by the prospect of a bargain or two.
My favourite character is a burly man who plans to go fishing after his shopping expedition. "They said don't come; so where is it am I not supposed to go?" he puzzles. Later, musing on the film-makers' deceit, he spits: "People want to be better than those around them." This seems a harsh but fair assessment of Klusák and Remunda's attitude.
