<em>Bára – Diary of a Rockstar</em>

The rock bio is a documentary staple that, at its most formulaic, charts a star’s dizzying rise, public struggles with fame’s excesses, and tragic downfall. The title of Czech director Helena Třeštíková‘s latest film, Bára – Diary of a Rockstar, which had its world premiere this week in her home country at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, suggests at first glance an intimate exposé of a scandalous life, but anyone who has delved into the prior body of work of the acclaimed documentarian knows to expect nothing superficial or sensationalised about her take on the world of rock celebrity. Indeed, her film about vocalist Bára Basiková, who has been a major figure in the Czech music world since the 80s, when she was in bands Precedens and Stromboli, strips away the industry facade to offer something very raw, multi-faceted and real.

Avoiding judgment

Třeštíková, who was born in Prague and studied at famed film school FAMU, is known for making observational documentaries that follow frequently marginalised subjects over several years, avoiding overt judgments, interviews, or scripted interference but allowing insights to form through the repetitions, patterns or reversals that come with a lapse of time as lives gradually unfold. Her series Marriage Studies, for instance, captured the lives of six married couples from their weddings over the 1980s; Rene (2008) revisited a man who was in and out of prison; and Mallory (2015) followed the story of a woman in recovery from drug addiction. Bára – Diary of a Rockstar offers us time and space, across fifty years of Basiková’s life, to reflect on how patriarchal societies undermine talented and exceptional women who do not fit into a box of traditional gender roles, pressuring them to shrink their ambitions and to pay back their perceived over-reaching by never asking for any of their other personal needs to be met. At least, that is one possible reading; Třeštíková would never assume to interpret events for us.

«all these marriages are carbon copies»

Sustained focus

Basiková trusts Třeštíková with very close access, and thoughts shared with us as voiceover commentary. We see her impressively wide-ranging, sustained career as a singer in a creative milieu that is not well remunerated. Her finances are \”screwed,\” as she puts it plainly, but she subsists with grit, long rehearsal hours, reinvention as a star of musicals like Rusalka and Joan of Arc, and the occasional shame-faced compromise (namely, a well-paying job for the Red Army, pre-full-scale Ukraine invasion) But the film’s real strength — especially for audiences abroad unfamiliar with the singer — is as a candid, revealing portrait of the tension between her public image and private life. As her success complicates the power dynamics across a string of failed relationships, resentments grow, egos are threatened, and she often minimises men’s questionable behaviour. The long-term, sustained focus, so rare in documentaries, and particularly in portraits of famous figures, allows us to see the pattern recur: of initial hope in a honeymoon period of new love, followed by disillusionment and crisis. Her partners are often without steady employment, at times taking on the role of stay-at-home parents, and turning to alcohol or other coping mechanisms in a society that has done little to normalise the idea of women as breadwinners.

The immense pressure in Basiková’s line of work to appear functional and happy, when inside she may be falling apart, has meant emotional repression and a lack of any support outlet for her in an entertainment industry obsessed with marketable image. Třeštíková’s approach of receptive empathy, making space for the whole person with a form of unfiltered diary, counters this. There is a shocking betrayal — one partner’s hostile «daughter» turns out to be not his child but his mistress — which lands Basiková, for a stint, in psychiatric care. But mostly what comes through is a cycle of guilt and codependency, as the singer keeps choosing men she needs to look after. «If I really want something it doesn’t work out, all these marriages are carbon copies,» she says, only gradually coming to unapologetically relish her independence and agency.

Markétka

A song, Marie Rottrová’s Markétka, about a woman being urged to move on after her fiancé lied and went off with another woman, bookends the film: first, with a young Basiková singing it on television, to help propel her to fame, and lastly, at her sixtieth birthday celebration with her children. It’s an effective framing choice, with the song encapsulating a power imbalance in romances so ingrained that it’s imposed on the teen Bára almost like a prophecy, which she suffers through but finally takes ownership of, reaching her twilight years with her freedom renewed.