In folklore on film, the peasant girl laboring for ungrateful people has been situated in several variations of Cinderella. One of cinema’s most active renditions of the rags-to-riches heroine is found in Three Wishes for Cinderella (Václav Vorlíček, 1973). Three Wishes‘ screenplay was adapted from a story by Božena Němcová, whose work inspired several fairy tale films (as well as Franz Kafka’s writing), but Němcová had also previously written another peasant girl whose story was adapted to film with Divá Bára (Vladimír Čech, 1949). Despite Divá Bára being made decades earlier, it flirts with a darker and occasionally erotic tone in contrast to the more playful tone and heroine of Three Wishes.
The film’s slightly unusual mixture of elements are immediately apparent in the opening scenes. An idyllic pastoral landscape is overtaken by a lightning storm while a child is born amidst whispers of witchcraft. As the mother dies in childbirth, she requests the child be named Bára (short for Barbara). The scene fades out on her outstretched hand clutching a cross necklace. The film then springs forward to a forest where a young woman is seen wearing the cross necklace. She beams at the sky, then lowers her lambent gaze as she dives to bathe in a lake. (Čech’s film shares the same editor as Gustav Machaty’s Ecstasy, featuring another luxuriously photographed scene of a woman bathing in a lake.) Bára is being spied on by local men. When she comes out, gets dressed, and stops to admire an insect, one of the men jumps at her. She throws him off, he falls into the lake, and she runs away laughing under rays of light wafting through the forest.
The film’s title translates to “Wild Barbara,” a term that is flung at her with derision throughout. The effect of Bára’s beauty on the local men, her fearless nature, and her kinship with animals is scapegoated by locals. For instance, in one scene, while everyone else dodges a horse carriage running rampant through the village, it’s Bára who runs directly to the horse and calms it into stopping. But this bravery and skill with animals is viewed only as evidence that she is a witch dabbling with the devil. In another sequence, Bára is blamed for a farmer’s cow dying. A villager subsequently threatens her, to which she scoffs, saying he wouldn’t go through with it because “who’ll do your hard work?”
Perhaps the key factor that distinguishes Divá Bára from Cinderella stories is the twist on the pivotal dance scene. For Cinderella, the ballroom is the class inverter and the moment that elevates her outside of her social limitations. But Bára does not have the aid of a magician to mask the markers of social difference. When a man dares ask her to join him, he is scolded by his family and pressured out of the invitation. The storied fairy tale moment of elevation cannot take place. This depressing scene only changes when a man who isn’t intimidated by the sneering townspeople asks Bára to dance, to which she admits she can’t dance, and laughter breaks out. Unfaltering, he requests the band play a number they’d both be able to dance to, but the sequence bears none of the fanfare that accompanies Cinderella’s awe-inspiring ballroom disguise.
After the increase of these slights, Bára jokes with her more respectable friend, Eliska, about witchcraft. As they discuss their personal lives, Eliska wishes Bára did have magical powers that could help break Eliska free of the strict family that is pushing her to accept a marriage proposal she doesn’t want. Bára jokingly tries to summon the devil, then gasps at the sudden appearance of the man who danced with her. Placing the romantic lead in the shoes of the devil is another instance of the film playfully undermining the warped logic of the villagers’ conflations of Bára with dark magic and its dangers, since this man is one of the only stable sources of help she’s had. Bára joins him, and a succession of romantic images follow: as they playfully chase each other through the forest, they reach for each other’s hands through the trees and follow each other up to the mountaintop, where the camera pans from their kiss to the peak’s envelope of clouds and fog.
In Divá Bára‘s final scenes, the carriage of Eliska’s unwanted suitor is heading toward her home, but is interrupted by a figure who claims to be a ghost (it’s actually Bára giggling under a sheet, having made an elaborate plan to scare off this man). When Eliska overhears that her suitor has been thrown by a “ghost,” she quietly chuckles in delight, knowing it must have been Bára. But this stunt as a ghost in dedication to her friend’s real wishes aggravates the townspeople, whipping them into a pitchfork-wielding mob. They chase Bára throughout the forest and into a mortuary, which they lock her inside. An accident leads to the mortuary catching fire. Her deliverance is yet again up to her male suitor, who is the only one brave enough to climb through the flames to rescue her. He scolds the villagers for the destruction their heavy bias and convenient magical beliefs have led them to. In anger and exhaustion, Bára says she’s leaving town. When a man snidely asks where she’ll go, as if there’s nowhere that would welcome her, her friend answers: “With me.” As Bára walks away with this friend, Eliska calls out “Thank you,” and the film’s credits roll. The heroine finds an offbeat yet happy ending: although she does not win over her critics, she’s lost interest in their opinion and will no longer be around to be taken advantage of, either for their gain or their cruel spectatorship.
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