A Handsome Film About a Hideous Policy: 'Only Beautiful Things to Look At' and the Aesthetics of State Cruelty

The room is hung with pleated shades the colour of weak tea, the teak credenza is buffed to a working glow, and the lampshade throws a circle of warm light across a magazine opened at a kitchen essay. It is, as advertised, a beautiful thing to look at. It is also, the film insists, the cover story for what the same state is doing down the road, in clinics where the same neat paperwork is being used to authorize the irreversible surgery of Roma women.

Slavomir's feature, reviewed in Variety on 11 July 2026, sets out to put two Czechoslovakias on screen at once: the one that sold itself to the West at trade fairs, and the one that administered a campaign of coerced sterilization to Romani women through the late 1980s. The film wants you to see the dresses and feel the policy. On the first count it more or less succeeds. On the second, it has to fight its own good taste.

The trick the film pulls off

The opening reels are a documentary-grade catalogue of period design. The tailoring, the interiors, the luggage, the wallpapers: each is given the careful, lingering treatment usually reserved for museum exhibitions. Variety's review notes the effort as "painstakingly evoked," and the word is chosen well. The camera lingers, the dialogue stays thin, and the world appears to be running on its own aesthetic logic.

That world, in the film's framing, is what was on display at the Brno trade fair and the export catalogues sent west. Czechoslovakia under normalisation was a country that wanted to be photographed well, and a great deal of state energy went into the production of that photograph. To live in that country, the film argues, was to be inserted into the photograph whether you wanted to be or not.

The trick the film only half pulls off

The sterilization plotline runs on a parallel track. A Roma woman, signed into hospital for a routine gynaecological matter, is counselled, signed, and operated on without her knowing that the consent form is for a tubal ligation. Her husband finds the discharge paperwork. A junior doctor, awake to what is happening, is warned off by a senior consultant invoking the ward's quarterly quota.

Variety's reviewer describes the portrait as "muffled," and the word does work. The film's compositional instinct is to hold back: to register the horror in details rather than in scenes. The effect is decorous. It is also, for this material, a little safe.

The politics the film refuses to sentimentalise

A useful counterweight is what the film declines to do. The campaign is not framed as a relic of the Stalinist 1950s. It is shown running through the 1980s, comfortably within the late-normalisation period, signed off in the same neat hand as the export catalogues. The doctors are not monsters. They are tired professionals working inside a system where the targets are passed down and the paperwork closes the case. The horror, the film suggests, was administrative.

That is a harder argument than it sounds. State violence against Roma women in central and eastern Europe was real, documented after the fact by ombudsmen in several successor states, and recognised in late-2020s settlements by the Czech and Slovak governments. To show it as administrative rather than monstrous is to refuse the audience the comfort of a single villain. Variety notes that the film does so at the cost of dramatic pressure.

What remains uncertain

What the review does not, and could not, settle is how the film will land for the audiences it most directly addresses. Romani viewers and survivors' groups will bring a measure that no trade review can substitute for. The release calendar, the Czech and Slovak distributor's outreach to Romani media, and whether women's organisations in both countries endorse or contest the central portrayal remain to be reported.

There is also the question of how a non-Czech audience reads a film in which the regime's visual self-presentation is so central. Without the surrounding catalogue of design and trade-fair history, the contrast that drives the film lands less hard. The export-photo Czechoslovakia, the film insists, was the same state that signed the consent forms. For viewers outside the region, that equivalence has to be taught; the film does it, but quietly.

The final shot returns to the living room. The pleated shade. The teak credenza. The lampshade. The wife is ironing. The husband has just read the discharge note. The camera holds. The audience is meant to hold with it. It is a handsome ending to a film about a hideous policy, and "handsome" is, the film has just spent two hours arguing, exactly the problem.

Desk note: Monexus treats cinema from central and eastern Europe as primary coverage, not as novelty. The film is reviewed against the historical record on coerced sterilisation in late-1980s Czechoslovakia, not against an export-catalogue ideal of what the era looked like.