"And For You I Will Come As Well..." from Lupus Pictures is an odd production. Your faithful reviewer has had to watch it several times in order to work out a coherent description of the film, which would reflect its kink value as well as its several oddities.
The main raison d'etre of this film is introduction of stinging nettles to the array of Lupus' punishment implements. The use of nettles is perfectly authentic in Eastern Europe; they were/are often used as a cheap, ready instrument of immediate correction in rural areas. To further the believability of their scenario, Lupus have chosen to return to 1950 as their setting. The Lupus ethos tells us that in the 50s discipline in the family was immediate and brutal - hardly even believable to a modern viewer. They seem to wish to document this brutality as close to life as possible, often opting for unattractive - yet realistic - make-up, dialogues and CP techniques. They seem to count on the stark brutality and shock value to create weird Lupus-brand eroticism. Whether this works for you, is a question of personal preferences.
As though to distance themselves from the harshness of the story, they pile on surreal elements: the film is crawling with mythical creatures, which appear a propos nothing: there's Death, a Water Sprite, a Devil, and some others. Their presence, it seems, is supposed to signal to the viewer that the rest of the story is meant to look just as surreal as all the super-natural elements.
The story, meanwhile, is one of peer pressure and traditional rustic values.
At the opening of the film (that is, after we have watched Death walk across the screen with his scythe) we see three schoolgirls making their way through the fields. They're dressed in Soviet Pioneers' uniforms: blue skirts, white blouses, crimson ties. They are tittering at each other, and as they approach, we can overhear the conversation. The two girls walking at the sides are making fun of the third girl's fashion sense. It's amazing how many fashion faux pas a girl can commit when she's wearing a uniform, but apparently, there's still plenty of room for manoeuvre: they criticise her hairstyle (demure plaits, while her critics' hair is prettily cropped and is supported by fancy ribbons), little-girl socks (apparently, stockings are now more in style), lack of nail varnish. The young lady thus criticised, sweet, impressionable Petra (played by the wonderful Jana Myši?ková, whom we have had the pleasure of seeing in "Great Role" and "Stalin 2"), immediately goes home and tries to give herself a little fashion make-over: she paints her nails red, back-combs her hair and puts on a generous layer of make-up. (Knee socks remain; we suspect poor Petra doesn't own any stockings.)
Wearing a nice flowery dress and a white ribbon in her hair, she leaves the house - only to meet her mother before she has as much as walked out of the courtyard. Mother (Suiza Jank?) drops the bucket she was carrying, and instead grabs her daughter, and berating her for getting herself made up like a whore, drags her bodily to the water pump in the yard. There she bends the poor girl over and sticks her head under flowing water until every trace of make-up is gone. Then, with her hand keeping a firm grip on Petra's soaked hair, Mother drags her back into the house.
Here comes the first punishment of the film: Mother whips Petra with a braided switch (we suspect it might be a pomlazka left over from the previous Easter, although we are surprised it's survived for so long in this household). The whipping is extremely fast-paced; the mother is not particularly concerned with accuracy, and lets the switch wrap on every stroke, the result being that the main bulk of marks in on the side of the girl's hip.
Then it's a new day, and the three schoolgirls are walking across the field again, the two fashionable sisters excitedly discussing French shoes with spike heels. Petra makes a pit-stop by the roadside (no details are shown), and her two schoolmates laugh at the welts from her spanking. She returns the teasing by asking one of the girls, who has also yanked her panties down, whether her shaved off pubic hair means she'd had lice. The sisters quickly set her straight: shaving your pubes is considered normal, whereas she, Petra, looks like an ape with all the ugly body hair, and must do something about it.
In the next shot the pliant Petra is dutifully covering her armpits and pubes with shaving foam and starts scraping at her hair with a razor.
Then it's the following morning; Petra's father (played by Pavel Š?astný, who throws himself in the role of this unbalanced, unpleasant man with every dedication) is stretching and scratching his balls in the yard, birds are singing, and in the corner of the yard Death is quietly sharpening his scythe.
Father tries shaving at the dinner table, griping about his completely blunt razor, Mother is not pleased that he blames it on her, and for the next few minutes we witness a marital fight spiraling out of control - very realistic, although hardly erotic. It ends with Mother slamming the door behind her as she strides out of the house to the outside privy - where, yanking the door open, she finds Petra with her nightgown around her waist, her shaved girly bits on display.
Mother is livid. She drags the girl into the house by the ear, and yanks her nightgown off, showing Father why his razor is blunt. Petra, mortified, tries to crawl away, but Father grabs her by the hair and propels her to the middle of the kitchen, where she lies sobbing on the floor while her parents scream at her. She protests that everybody at school shaves, and they called her an ape, but Father is not impressed all the same.
Petra is dispatched into the garden (naked) to cut a switch; she dejectedly saws it off a larger branch, strips it of its leaves and walks back to the house to hand it to her father. He gets more furious by the second, and demands that she tells him who incited her to shave her body hair. Petra cowers, but refuses to answer. Red in the face, Father bends her forcefully over the table and flails at her behind with the switch. In fairness we must note that, while the character is out of control, shouting, calling his daughter unflattering names and throwing her about by her hair, the actor Pavel Š?astný is very precise and competent with the switch; this makes the whole scene easier to take in.
Bizarrely, after several licks of the switch Father decides to have his breakfast at this point. He makes the sobbing Petra kneel facing the wall while he has a cup of coffee with bread-and-butter, ranting at her all the while. Then he gets into another screaming match with Mother over lack of meat on the breakfast table; all in all, there is a great deal of shouting in this scene, and we would advise you to watch it with the sound turned well down. While her parents are arguing, Petra is still sniffling in the corner with her marked bottom on display, until eventually Father is ready to deal with her again.
He enquires whether she's ready to tell him who gave her the shaving idea; when she refuses to speak, he storms out and gets a thicker, scarier switch. While he is out, Mother tells Petra off for making Father angry, and Petra's sobbing intensifies.
Returning with the gigantic switch, Father resumes the punishment. Only a few strokes of the new switch are enough to convince Petra to give up the names of the sisters who teased her, however, the whipping doesn't stop there. Father continues thrashing the girl hard enough that she manages to crawl onto the table trying to avoid the strokes. At this point plenty of strokes go astray, with the tip of the switch landing on her thighs, and her bottom looks an unholy mess afterwards.
It is one of the more brutal punishments in the Lupus collection, made harder to take in because of Father's angry behaviour and name-calling. Finally the punishment stops, although we are not sure whether Father thought the girl had had enough, or whether he simply got tired of whipping her full-force while holding down her wriggling form.
Here comes the main original feature of the film: Father sends Petra outside with a basket to bring him fresh nettles. She has to pick them with her bare hands, crouching naked in the garden. We watch her pick every leaf, wincing along with her. Back inside, Father (who is wearing thick gloves) picks up a heap of nettles and lines Petra's panties with them. She can hardly bear to pull the panties up, until Father finally yanks them up for her, and forbids her to take the nettles out while she's at school.
Sure enough, the first thing Petra does when she is safely on the road to school is take all the nettles out of her knickers. Before she's finished, the other girls have caught up with her, and laugh at her for having visible marks from her whipping showing from under her raised skirt. The gleefully inform her that *their* father would never dare raise his hand at them, and look quite pleased with their perceived superiority. Little do they know that very soon Petra's father will pay a visit to their own to have a little chat about the influence of the two sisters have on Petra.
The Other Father (Zbyšek Podhájský, whose name careful viewers may recognise as that of the director of Lupus films) pours around the house in search of a suitable implement, and finally locates a thin supple stick. He marches determinedly through the fields until he sees the girls returning from school. He hides behind the bushes until the girls are level with him, and then springs on them, grabbing his daughters by their ears and strides home, a squealing girl in each hand.
Meanwhile, Petra, who had stayed behind under the pretence of leaving her pencilbox at school, finds a patch of nettles and arranges them inside her panties just like her father had done that morning.
Father is waiting for her at home, and sarcastically enquires how she enjoyed sitting on her shaved bodyparts all day. He makes her take out the nettles and bring some fresh ones: he intends for her to continue wearing nettles inside her panties until her hair grows back.
Meanwhile, at the neighbours' house, the two sisters, stripped naked, are on their knees in front of their father, begging him to spare them their punishment. He is looks furious enough that we doubt that forgiveness will be forthcoming.
Cut back to Petra and her father, and they both hear the sound of smacks and loud yelps from the neighbours' house. Petra doesn't look as through she gloats at the sisters' misfortunes, although nobody could fault her if she was a little bit triumphant. Father hopes that she appreciates now that other parents are just as strict with their daughters as he is with her.
To prove the point we are shown the punishments of the two sisters.
The first girl is suffering under the cane, lying on the bed with some pillows under her stomach. The end of the stick starts fraying from the first few strokes. We are not sure whether it's because of the stick's split end or the actress's inexperience with CP, but the skin of her right buttock is weeping blood in few places. Although Zbyšek Podhájský turns the stick over as soon as he notices that the end is damaged, and from that moment on visibly takes every care to hit the girl only on her undamaged left buttock, droplets of blood from the deep welts are hard to ignore.
Momentarily we watch Petra weed the garden, wincing in discomfort at the nettles in her panties and at the cries coming from the neighbours' house. When we return there, it's the second sister's turn to take her licking. After a few strokes, the stick is in pieces, and the Other Father must go and borrow another one from the neighbours; he returns with a thicker, more supple cane, and continues the thrashing of his second daughter. She is also incredibly marked by the end, although she doesn't end up with the seeping welts like her sister's: the damage is quite severe, but evenly spread.
The next morning all three girls are stiffly walking on the familiar road across the field. They stop as one, lower their panties and shake nettles out of them into the road, while we survey their thoroughly welted bottoms.
The final shot is that of Death, who gives a knowing look into the camera and pronounced: "And for you I will come as well." As he hasn't killed anybody we noticed in the film, we can't but wonder: as well as who? We will leave you to figure out what that was all about, if you care to.
Bonus: The bonus feature on this DVD is the interview with the actresses Marie Dvo?áková and Norah Kristoff, who play naughty fashion-conscious sisters. After their punishment they lie side by side of their bed and chat to the perennial Lupus interviewer Michal Valášek. Unfortunately, nobody thought to include subtitles on this bonus feature, but this is remedied by the inclusion of the English transcript of the interview on the website for the film, found here: http://tinyurl.com/dktwr
The DVD also includes an extensive gallery of stills and several trailers for earlier Lupus productions.
