The Affair, Based on Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room

Villa Tugendhat is like Czechia’s Falling Water House. Designed by Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich, it was the happy home of the Tugendhat family, who did not move out voluntarily. However, they managed to leave Czechoslovakia in the nick of time, avoiding the worst of the German occupation. Understandably, the children of the Tugendhats were not entirely thrilled when Simon Mawer used their family home to create a fictional “fantasia” about a much more dysfunctional family. Similarly, they weren’t too crazy with the news of a film adaptation of Mawer’s novel (Mies’ heirs might not be ecstatic either), but here it is regardless. The tragic history of the Czech Republic unfolds alongside Mawer’s made-up melodrama in Julius Sevcik’s English-language Czech-production The Affair, which releases this Friday on VOD.

In this alternate reality, Viktor Landauer built Villa Tugendhat as a wedding gift for his bride Liesel, who is crazy about modernist architecture. However, even he balks at the expenses run up by the renowned architect Von Abt, especially the red marble he installs. Still, Viktor must admit the way it glows when the sun rises really is quite amazing. Liesel’s best friend Hana Hankova is so struck by the villa, she takes Von Abt as a lover, even though he isn’t a very good one. Frankly, she would rather love Liesel, but her married friend is not ready to go there yet.

Sadly, the war will separate them before they can fully workout their issues. Likewise, Viktor Landauer will carry the baggage of his dalliances with the nanny, another possible affair the flawed international title could refer to. Recognizing the writing on the wall, the Jewish Landauers manage to leave on one of the last Casablanca-style flights out. Hanakova and her Jewish husband are not so lucky. To protect him, she becomes the mistress of Stahl, a military contractor, who has requisitioned the villa to serve as a drafting workshop (another affair, but not exactly one freely entering into).

The first half of The Affair really is melodramatic (to the point of cheesiness). However, the second half becomes much more compelling, focusing on Hanakova as she navigates the National Socialist occupation and the subsequent Soviet domination of Czechoslovakia. Through her eyes, we see the decline of the nation, as reflected by the deterioration of the Villa (that eventually becomes host to squatting black marketeer). Frankly, the aspects of the film that work the best really do not require Mawer’s controversial meta-fictionalization of the Tugendhat family. Anyone from the era could relate to the Villa as a symbol of past glory.

Carice van Houten is indeed very strong as Hanakova. She brings strength to the modern Czech woman, even as she endures the indignities of consecutive occupations. She is sort of revisiting her role in Black Book, but Hanakova is arguably more human, being a flawed but protective wife and eventually a fiercely loving mother. She is also critical to the biting scenes that set up the 1968 Soviet invasion.

NYJFF ’15: The Tugendhat House

Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building might be an exemplar of International style architecture, but its glass and steel basically are what they are. That is often the case with his American work, but the Villa Tugendhat in Brno is something else entirely. While it still reflects his modernist aesthetic, it also happens to a house that breathes and welcomes occupants. It is a surprisingly livable space, which is why it has been consistently repurposed by subsequent appropriating regimes. Dieter Reifarth chronicles the history of the home and its original [rightful] owners in The Tugendhat House (trailer here), which screens during this year’s New York Jewish Film Festival.

Reifarth opens the documentary by opening up Tugendhat House, slowly panning through its restored rooms and open flowing spaces, as disembodied voices read the polarized reviews it originally garnered in the architectural press. The Tugendhats no longer reside here, thanks to the National Socialists and the Communists who followed them, but philosopher Ernst Tugendhat fondly remembers the years he lived there as a small boy. So does one Tugendhat sister, but the youngest was born while the family was in exile. However, the entire Tugendhat-Guggenhein-Hammer family takes an active interest in the restoration campaign, including one  who happens to be a refurbishment expert.

Although they lost many extended family members to the Holocaust, the Tugendhat nucleus managed to get out while the getting was good, resettling in Switzerland and later Venezuela. Given their sensibilities, it is rather remarkable the Tugendhat House survived the Nazi and Soviet occupations. While the Germans simply used it as another piece of prime real estate to dole out as they deemed fit, the Communist authorities fashioned it into a long-term children’s spinal clinic. Frankly, the Tugendhat form seems completely ill-suited to such a function, but former patients found the natural light quite cheerful. Decades later, the final divorce decree between the Czech and Slovak Republics was ironed out there, permanently fixing the building in the Czech collective memory.

T House is an unusually balanced fusion of architectural appreciation and sweeping history. If you don’t know Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from Ludwig von Mises you might find many passages of the film rather archi-geeky. Nevertheless, Reifarth really gives you a vivid sense of the villa as a distinctive space and place. He also doggedly follows the twists of the Tugendhat family story, as well as the wider cultural context of their increasingly iconic home.

After watching T House, the Villa Tugendhat will almost assuredly become viewers’ favorite Mies van der Rohe building, which may or may not be thunderous bragging rights given their respective interest in the art and practice of architecture, but that still means it is rather smart and effective as a work of documentary filmmaking. Of course, for those who are well versed in Mies van der Rohe and the International School, it is like catnip. Yet everyone should find some meaning in the tragedies and resiliency of the Tugendhats’ exile experience. Highly recommended for those fascinated by the art and history under discussion, The Tugendhat House screens this coming Wednesday (1/28) at the Walter Reade Theater, as part of the 2015 NYJFF.