Charlatan

Charlatan (Šarlatán, 2020) is an Agnieszka Holland drama you can watch online on iFILM. It draws on the life of Jan Mikolášek, a Czech herbalist who read illness from a bottle of urine and brewed cures from plants when trained doctors had given up.

His fame took hold between the wars and somehow survived every shift in power — Nazi officers and Communist officials alike came knocking, because the man got results no one could explain. Ivan Trojan plays the older Mikolášek as guarded, severe and hard to love; his real-life son Josef Trojan plays the younger version. Beside him stands František, his assistant and secret lover, a bond that leaves the healer exposed in a country that puts men on trial for it.

Holland isn't filming a saint's life. She paints a knotted man in whom gift and cruelty, tenderness and possessiveness sit side by side, unreconciled. When a new regime decides it no longer needs him, the protection he relied on curdles into prosecution. The Czech entry in the Oscar race, it rewards anyone who likes slow, uneasy European cinema about the price of bargaining with power. Stream Charlatan (2020) online on iFILM.