Pa’lante
2020 · 18m · República Checa
Directed by David Van
Genres: comedy, coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, melancholic
In Prague, 26-year-old Simon is going through a difficult breakup; when he discovers that his still-beloved ex-girlfriend Johana has started dating a transsexual, his best friend Jáchym supports him with parties, alcohol and drugs, until Jáchym finds a girlfriend and falls in love, leaving Simon completely alone to come to terms with the situation after a crazy New Year's Eve.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise wants to be about heartbreak and toxic friendship, but it's actually just a guy mad that his ex is dating someone trans—and the film doesn't interrogate that at all, which would've been genuinely interesting. Instead it settles into sad-guy-gets-drunk territory, wasting the one subversive element it stumbled into.
Van situates this firmly in the post-2010 Eastern European coming-of-age tradition, with the melancholic hangover aesthetic and ensemble male friendship dynamics we recognize from Laughton and similar Prague-set work; the formal restraint is admirable, even if the thematic through-line feels somewhat familiar.
The film lives in the micro-moment—the specific cut from Jáchym's new-relationship glow back to Simon's isolation, or the sound choice of muffled New Year's Eve chaos while he sits still—and those decisions do the emotional work that the script doesn't quite earn, lifting what could've been a conventional breakup arc into something genuinely lonely.