Ostre sledované vlaky (1966)'s comments

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garvey

Funny and serious at the same time. Comedy and tragedy in one movie.
Very good. But to understand film one needs to feel like its characters.

And it's very Czech movie.

12 years 6 months ago

When I watched Jiří Menzel's Capricious Summer the other day, I thought the humor was odd. His first (and Oscar-winning) feature, Closely Watched Trains, is more traditionally funny. Set during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia (but no doubt criticizing the Communist regime at the same time), our man Milos is by design a version of "The Good Soldier", from a family of "Good Soldiers", a character whose artful evasion of duty is apparently representative of the Czech national character. The film is really about impotence. Milos', who is despondent when he fails to make it with his girlfriend and watches trains go by without ever having ridden one (and when the Nazis put him on a train, they throw him off being going anywhere, and then there's the equally short trip in the climax). All acts of rebellion against the German regime are futile gestures in the end. So this to me is very much about the country itself, a country that had been under the thumb of other powers for as long as anyone remembered (Austria, Germany, the USSR), and powerless to do anything about it. Even the amusing subplot about the cousin sleeping with every girl in town and rubber-stamping them seems to speak to that idea of having several mistresses in succession. With a lot of comically erotic imagery (a hole in a couch, the neck of goose, etc.) and an older generation obsessed with the decline of morals, this is a sex comedy that's really about national character, of the kind Menzel could only make during the relaxed period that gave us the Czech New Wave.

4 years 5 months ago