Review of
Glory,
a Film Movement video
Five out of five stars
What makes this
story work is the quality of the acting, the two main characters play their
parts so very well. Tzanko Petrov is a linesman for the railroad, he walks the
tracks, checking and tightening the bolts that hold down the rails. He lives
very simply, has a scruffy beard and works hard for little pay. He is also
aware of the endemic corruption in the Ministry of Transport.
One day when he
is walking his assigned rail line, he first finds a few loose items of paper
money and then encounters a massive pile of money beside the tracks. Being an
honest man, Tzanko reports his discovery to the police and he is hailed as a
hero.
Julia Staikova
is head of public relations for the Ministry of Transport and she is totally
obsessed with her job, never straying far from her phone and processing every
event through her personal filter of the spin of best appearances.
Tzanko is
placed in front of the cameras and he has some form of speech difficulty where
he has problems formulating vocal streams of more than one or two words at a
time. He is hailed as a hero and given a new watch, in order to showcase it,
Julia takes his old one, a family heirloom. When his new watch does not work
right and Tzanko does not get his old watch back, he continues to contact the
ministry trying to speak to someone sympathetic to his plight.
When Tzanko
finally goes on a revelatory journalistic expose television show, Julia is
furious and does everything she can to destroy him. She shows an incredibly
ruthless streak, openly lying to Tzanko and showing only contempt for him as a
manual laborer. Julia demonstrates a mindset that the media buzz is all that
matters.
The ending is
somewhat ambiguous, when Julia realizes the consequences of what she has done
to Tzanko and tries to make amends, he reacts negatively, but the viewer is cut
off from the complete scene. Therefore, what really happened can only be acted
out in the mind of the viewer.
The actors that
play Tzanko and Julia are superb, Tzanko is a very believable simple laborer with
a speech problem and Julia is a cold, ruthless and unprincipled media hawk
focused on her career. It is a movie that keeps your attention while you root
for the honest man in way over his uncontrolled hair.
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