The Holy Quaternity

Jan Hrebejk (Divided We Fall, Beauty in Trouble) is perhaps best known internationally for his 2009 film Kawasaki’s Rose, which examined the spiraling after-effects of a Czech cultural hero’s unmasking as a petty-minded Communist collaborator. It was about the personal and the political and how the two can’t really be separated. The Holy Quaternity takes the same concerns and lightly, very lightly, applies them to the frame of that most worthy and sturdy of Czech genres, the sex comedy.

Ondra (Hynek Cermák) and Vitek (Jirí Langmajer) are the best of friends, two middle-aged electricians who share the same employer, the same duplex, similarly aged children who date one another, the same sense of utter and complete boredom with their wives and their sex lives. They also share the same sneaking suspicion that if they could only swap spouses: hoo boy! It seems that both have been harbouring design’s on the other’s wife…

When the two of them are offered a job to work on together—restoring the electrical grid after a hurricane has torn through a sparsely inhabited Caribbean island—they leap at the chance to enjoy a little tropical sunshine while launching the kind of cunning plan people in sex comedies tend to launch. What ensues is a sunny romp—with a couple of serious questions in the back of its mind…