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You’ve Heard Of The Invisible Hand Of The Market, Right? | Well, as these Czech Dream customers will soon find out, the market is invisible as well.

CZECH DREAM
Directed by Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel). Fri, Sun, Tue-Wed, May 29, 31, June 2-3.
***1/2

The Czech Dream hypermarket has it all. In a country full of slimy advertising and robotic mega-stores, it’s got an amiable cartoon bubble logo and a series of winking anti-ads. “Don’t come,” they say. “Don’t spend.” The store’s hip young managers, Vít and Filip, know that today’s customers are savvy — they want a bit of surprise with their groceries. Its prices are low, of course, but the real intrigue behind the store and its big opening gala is that the address is kept top secret until a few days beforehand, when it’s revealed that Czech Dream is located, cleverly, next to a huge meadow outside of Prague. Three thousand people show up on the morning of May 31, 2003, shopping lists in hand.

Oh, one other thing: the store isn’t real. As the shoppers approach the storefront from 300 metres away, many of them breaking into a full run, they realize it’s nothing more than a fancy banner and scaffolding. And those young managers? They’re film students, making a prank documentary about advertising and, almost by accident, Czech nationalism in the post-communism, pre-European Union era. Czech Dream is their final assignment, and it’s hard to imagine a student film — or the making of one, anyway — having a bigger impact on its home country than this one did.

To make such an elaborate lie palatable, Klusák and Remunda enlist a real ad agency to develop the Czech Dream campaign, a barrage of TV and radio spots, billboards, and newspaper flyers dummied up with false products at too-good-to-be-true prices. They conduct market research and interview families of self-proclaimed shopaholics. These scenes with the ad designers are the first indication that the film has more in mind than simply duping a crowd of repressed capitalists; we’re shown more than once how the companies in on the joke are equally driven by blind capitalism — Hugo Boss, for example, provided the directors with flashy suits in exchange for an extended close-up of the company logo. They grumble about ethics but accept the commission anyway.

In fact, it’s not clear that the directors were ever really out to embarrass the shoppers. And even if they were, it doesn’t quite work the way you might imagine it would: most of the people are either mildly amused or mildly upset, and only a handful of them flip off the camera or throw rocks at the banner. Given the tension leading up to it, it’s something of a fizzled payoff. Overall, the prank resembles a science experiment with too many variables — was the promise of a “surprise” too buried in the flyer? Did the sunny weather temper a potentially more visceral crowd reaction? Or are people just not as fired up by mall openings as we think?

The fake hypermarket does, however, bring out a fascinating latent reaction in several attendees. The opening of Czech Dream coincides almost exactly with the Czech government’s bid to enter the European Union, and after the flashy promise of a capitalist utopia falls flat, many a talk show host and newspaper columnist start drawing parallels.

Some of the specifics in Klusák and Remunda’s argument are a bit muddy, and the film goes to extreme pains to not be conclusive in any way, but hey: thanks to them, the prime minister himself had to appear on a TV panel show in order to defend his government’s EU publicity blitz. I hope they got at least an A-.