Up and Down is a devastatingly sincere Czech film that tries to say everything at once and somehow succeeds. The subject is a big one—tolerance in a post-Cold War, porous-bordered world—and it would be easy for a film with such ambitions to sink under the weight of its own moral pretensions. Director Jan Hrebejk, however, has found just the classical antidote to the disease of ham-fistedness: a deft mixture of humor and characterization that makes it clear that while the film is about Diversity, it is, more directly and more movingly, about Franta and Mila and Oto and Hana and Lenka and Martin—everyday Czechs caught in the whirlwind of changing times.
Mila (Natasa Burger) is unable to bear children, and Franta (Machacek) cannot adopt because he has a criminal record. They want a baby, though, so Mila buys one who has been separated from its mother by an immigrant-smuggling ring. Franta, whose soccer hooliganism has put him in the friendly company of Prague's hard-core racist fringe, is initially flustered at the sight of his dark-skinned baby, but in time he falls in love with the child and rejects his old soccer pals. The city outside is itchy with anxiety about the influx of newcomers from Asia and the Middle East, but in Franta's home, if only for a moment, ethnicity becomes irrelevant. There is, unfortunately, the small matter that the child belongs to someone else.
In a parallel story we meet Oto (Jan Triska), a professor and one-time dissident who has just suffered a stroke, his longtime girlfriend Hana (Ingrid Timkova)—an immigrant rights advocate—and their daughter Lenka (Lyska-Bokova), a beautiful and empathetic girl whose passion is Gypsy dance. Oto also has a grown son, Martin (Forman), a photographer who has moved to Australia. (Martin also happens to be Hana's former lover, but that is, as they say in Hollywood, the B story.) These are prosperous people, the lucky ones, but when Martin arrives in Prague to see his ailing father, a series of conflicts begins that brings them face-to-face not only with their own fear and ambivalence about migration, but also (somewhat outlandishly) with Franta's newly multiracial family.
In the end, the baby is returned to its mother, leaving Franta a wreck, swimming through the Prague underworld back to his racist friends. Nonetheless, he has glimpsed a small truth, one that Martin and Lenka are left to live out: The future has many colors, and many cultures. One can embrace the fact, or one can simply rot.