Beauty in Trouble

As the canard goes, no good deed goes unpunished, and that threat hangs over the head of Evzen (Josef Abrhám), a 60ish rich Czech expatriate with a soft heart. First, against his lawyer’s advice, he lets a tenant with a sick mother stay in the Prague house he wants to sell. Then he takes care of Marcela (Ana Geislerová) and her two children after Marcela’s husband (Roman Luknár) steals his car. Evzen is an angel, and Marcela hasn’t met many of those in her life, so she sees him as an escape from hardship and poverty. Jan Hrebejk inhabits this morality tale with complex and frustrating characters like Marcela’s mother-in-law, Líba (Emília Vásáryova), a former Communist schoolteacher now as fanatical about Jesus as she was about Lenin. Or Marcela’s stepfather, “Uncle Richie” (Jirí Schmitzer), a magnificently creepy Uriah Heep who might also be a pedophile. But don’t be quick to judge, as Evzen says. When the hymn sung in Líba’s church proclaims that everyone can be redeemed, it isn’t entirely ironic. Czech | 110 minutes | Kendall Square