BERLINALE 2020: Review: Charlatan
02/28/2020
Polish director – and at this point basically living legend – Agnieszka Holland sure works quickly. Almost scarily so, as barely a year after showing Mr. Jones [+] in the main competition of the Berlinale, she is already back, baby, with a new drama, Charlatan [+] – almost restoring the somewhat limping Berlinale Special Gala section to full health. It’s an imperfect, yet complex, take on the true story of 1930s Czech healer Jan Mikolášek (Ivan Trojan, whose very own son Josef Trojan takes over as his much younger self), a strong believer in the medicinal power of plants and known as the – wait for it – “oracle of urine”. If that proud title alone doesn’t make this film sound appealing, frankly what could?