Slavnosti snezenek / The Snowdrop Festival (1984 film, Czechoslovakia)

In my post on Rambling on: An Apprentice's Guide to the Gift of the Gab by Bohumil Hrabal I mentioned that Jiří Menzel had directed a movie based on those stories set in the Kresko settlement of Bohemia. I finally watched a copy of the movie with English subtitles and I found it almost as much of a joy as the stories on which they were based. This is the third Menzel movie I've watched based on Hrabal's stories and I'm convinced they were a match made in celluloid heaven. Menzel captures the playfulness, ambiguity, and the subversiveness of Hrabal's writing.

Menzel includes many of the quirky people and situations populating Rambling on, capturing their traits and peculiarities making them memorable. For example, watching the farmer take his goats for a ride in his car provides the same smile, inside and out, as the reading provided. Menzel downplays the subversion in Hrabal's stories, probably a factor of filming in Czechoslovakia in the early 1980s. Hrabal's chief of police dispenses arbitrary justice favoring his friends (and himself) while meddling in everyday affairs. While Menzel's characters distrust the police chief, he provides a calming effect on the populace, especially at a rowdy dinner party.

Even though the movie provides many laughs and smiles, a sadness permeates the bucolic setting. Like the stories, alcohol provides a social lubricant as well as an escape. Just what people are trying to escape isn't quite clear, amplifying Hrabal's ambiguous messages, although you wouldn't be far off the mark if you simply answered "their lives." While some things give these characters joy, many things drive their desire to escape, including family, work, government, opportunity, and materialism.

Similar to Hrabal's style, Menzel allows the quirkiness and banality of the residents to supply both beauty and humor. It's a dark humor, though, but one that celebrates the uniqueness of each character, breaking your heart while making you laugh. The central story for the movie is "The Feast," where competing hunting clubs argue over the right to feast on a wild boar shot in a local schoolroom. When you watch Menzel's version you'll agree with Hrabal's repeated admonition in the story that "you've never seen, nor could you have seen, the things I saw, we saw, the things that came to pass that time when a boar, a wild boar, got shot by us folk from Velenka inside the school at Přerov." Menzel combines "The Feast" with another story that marks a bittersweet turn to the drunken fight/feast.

I don't know where the movie was filmed but I seem to recall reading somewhere that the opening montage of local scenery was shot in and around Kresko (don't quote me on that, though), where Hrabal had a cottage he used when he wanted a break from Prague. Hrabal has a cameo in the movie, sitting on the porch of a pub with another patron, a pint of beer in front of him. I raised a glass to him while I was watching it and to the movie in general. Despite not displaying the full complexity of Hrabal's stories, Menzel does a wonderful job of adapting them to the screen. Very highly recommended.

Capricious Summer (1968 movie: Czechoslovakia)

Continuing with my sort-of-biweekly foreign movie posts for this year...

For more foreign movies, check out Caroline's World Cinema Series 2012 and Richard's monthly Foreign Film Festival round-up.

Jiří Menzel’s movie based on Vladislav Vančura’s Summer of Caprice highlights the “cinema ready” nature of Vančura’s novel. Menzel changed little, following much of the book. From the Criterion Collection’s essay Pearls of the Czech New Wave (a recommended read for the other movies listed, too):

As it opens, three friends in their fifties—Antonín (Rudolf Hrušínský), the proprietor of a bathhouse; Roch (František Rehák), a canon; and Major Hugo (Vlastimil Brodský)—are frolicking away the day swimming in a placid pond, smoking cigars, and drinking wine. Representing business, religion, and the military, the men are philosophical sparring partners as much as bosom buddies, engaging in debates about spirituality, commerce, and war. … A sudden rainstorm rousts the men from their diversions, a harbinger of change presaging the arrival in their village of the acrobat and magician Ernie (played by the amazingly dexterous Menzel himself, who shows off his tightrope-walking and handstanding skills). Ernie piques the erotic interest of Antonín’s wife, Katerina (Míla Myslíková), and the performer’s assistant, Anna (Jana Drchalová), piques that of all three men, who fumblingly attempt to seduce her (Antonín with a foot massage, Roch with poetry, Hugo with food). All these yearnings may as well be mere daydreams, however, as once the summer is over, Ernie and Anna get back in their caravan and leave the frustrated romantics to their own devices again.

The film could have easily been turned into a screwball sex comedy that would have undermined Vančura’s story. Fortunately the director didn’t go in that direction. Menzel captures the wistful and longing nature of the book very well—Anna awakens the passions of the middle-aged men but their inability to follow through on their desires highlights the melancholic feeling. Despite their bantering and barbs, their friendship remains at the core of the story.

Despite the faithfulness to the novel and the fine acting, the movie didn’t always “click” with me and I’m not exactly sure why. The languid pace and little action reflect the novel perfectly. I think part of it had to do with the ambiguity Vančura built into the story—were the men successful in their desire for Anna? Menzel removes the doubt, although his approach does play up the ineffectual nature of the men. His change in the major’s involvement during the fight between the magician and Anna also troubled me, but the modification does make for a funny final scene with the battered, bruised, and berated men sharing a drink while mulling over their humbling experiences.

As Obooki pointed out in a recent post, a much older Menzel points out in an interview there is a lack of compassion in current cinema. Capricious Summer gave the director a chance to highlight the compassion Vančura developed in his characters while also playing up the quirkiness of the place and people, providing a fun celebration of friendship and melancholy.

Note: I watched the Facets Videos DVD.

Larks on a String (1969 movie: Czechoslovakia)

Continuing with my sort-of-bi-weekly foreign movie posts for this year...
For more foreign movies, check out Caroline's World Cinema Series 2012 and Richard's monthly Foreign Film Festival round-up.

The IMDb.com page for this movie can be found here.

Bohumil Hrabal has been a favorite author of mine recently. Adapted for the screen by Hrabal and Jiří Menzel and directed by Menzel, this movie is a delight to watch. It captures Hrabal’s style well—he takes a depressing topic like life under Communism and focuses on the beauty of life, especially among offbeat characters, amid the travesty. A quick history on the film—Menzel and Hrabal filmed this in 1968 during the upheaval of that year in Czechoslovakia, only to have it suppressed by the new Communist regime. When the Communist regime fell the movie was officially released in 1990. Unfortunately several of the original scenes, censored during an attempt at an official release earlier, were saved only on deteriorating second copies.

I watched the movie from Second Run DVD, which is quickly becoming a favorite source for movies. Menzel filmed a 10 minute answer session on the film in which he provided the genesis for the format of the movie:

“The screenplay of Larks on a String is based on a book of short stories. All the stories have the same location but different characters. What was important was to make a coherent screenplay based on all those different characters. Hrabal used to say, ‘We have to plait it all into one braid.’” When we were looking for a way to link the separate storylines, how to unite these various characters, I remembered an old political joke from the ‘50s: The workers are ordered to attend a meeting where a comrade gives a lecture explaining, ‘In the present, we have socialism, but in the future we will have communism.’ After the lecture, he asks the workers if they have any questions. One of the workers raises his hand and says, ‘It’s good that we have socialism and will soon have communism, but where is the bread, where is the milk, where is the butter?’ The comrade answers, ‘This is a rather complicated question. Ask me again at the next lecture.’ A week later, the workers are ordered to attend another meeting, and the same thing happens—the comrade extols the virtues of socialism and communism, and afterwards asks if anyone has any questions. Another worker raises his hand and says, ‘It’s good we have socialism and will soon have communism, but where is the bread, where is the milk, where is the butter, and where is the worker who asked about this last time?’ So this old political joke gave us the key to the whole structure of the screenplay."

Considering the source is from short stories the movie doesn’t feel disjointed at all, uniting the various stories that unfold into the one braid Hrabal wanted. The setting begins in the late summer of 1950 (a reference is made to the Battle of Pusan in the Korean War at the start of the movie...although it's hard to ignore the same set of clothing is used regardless of different seasons) in the steel-manufacturing city of Kladno. We see the workers at a scrapyard, assigned to this dirty task for political reasons. Included in the group is a philosophy professor who refused to shred decadent Western texts, a public prosecutor who believed a defendant deserved a defense, an entrepreneur who had the gall to employ other workers, a barber that proved to be redundant since the country officially had 60% too many barbers, a professional musician because he played a bourgeois instrument (the saxophone), and a cook who refused to work on Saturdays. Voluntarily joining the group was a dairy farmer who closed his farm in order to help the state, although his idealism proved he would be the first casualty from the group.

Female prisoners also work in the scrapyard, serving a labor sentence for trying to defect. The guard overseeing the prisoners is about to be married to a free-spirited girl, someone who would rather dance with members of the gypsy band instead of participating in the formal wedding feast. The political supervisor running the scrapyard brags about his working-class past (while symbolically helping toss scrap into the rail-carts) and his concern for hygienic practices, the latter of which includes his penchant for bathing pubescent girls. Hrabal and Menzel even show the political boss' humanity, with a very awkward and depressing home scene where he drunkenly hopes to please his children. Here and elsewhere the banality of oppression is on full display.

Glimpses of the need for human contact shine through in the movie, ranging from the simple touching of hands to sex under the barbed wire of the prison. Despite the government's attempts the Communist symbolism of the junkyard, scrap being melted down into high-grade steel, doesn’t carry over to the melting down of people into a new human form designed to serve the state. The scrapyard became a failure when quotas were raised while the people never lower their resistance to indoctrination and control.

I’ve mentioned in previous foreign movie posts (or at least in the comments) that I wonder about the translation of cultural items in a movie. A few that stood out here was the graffiti scrawled in chalk, probably to offset the propaganda posters’ banal sayings. Another example: the supervisor upbraides workers not wanting to “get closer to socialism—what would the author of ‘Red Fire over Kladno’ think?” Sounds like a Communist tract that didn’t survive until the Velvet Revolution. What does translate well is the propaganda, especially that used in indoctrinating children. A teacher and her class arrive at the scrapyard to distribute red kerchiefs (May Day, perhaps?):

”The situation has worsened due to imperialists who are using our reactionaries for their evil aims. [Pointing to the female prisoners] Look at those repugnant, imperialism soaked faces. The fascist beast never sleeps. They stick their snouts into our blossoming garden. They exploit these monsters for subversion. We stopped them defecting to their benefactors. Keep away from them. Don’t be like one man who got in and impregnated an inmate. Another decadent capitalist soul for the world! We’re too kind! It seems that work discipline is vanishing.”

To which the philosopher replies: “No wonder. What’s more important is that real people are vanishing. Not just abstract, but real people are disappearing.”

I have many more notes, such as the symbolism of typewriters and crucifixes being thrown in the carts for melting down. I'll stop, though, with one philosophy discussion that ties in to the final scene. While the male workers are walking at night and discussing Kant (among other things), a man falls in an open latrine: “This is man’s glory! His head full of ideals, his feet stuck in shit! Victory is one big shithouse.”

Highly recommended.

I Served the King of England

From the back cover of the New Directions edition:

First published in 1971 as a typewritten edition, then finally printed in book form in 1989, I served the King of England is a comic novel telling the tale of Ditie, a hugely ambitious but simple waiter in a deluxe Prague hotel in the years before World War II. Ditie is called upon to serve not the King of England, but Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia. It is one of the great moments in his life. Eventually, he falls in love with a German woman athlete just as the Nazis are invading Czechoslovakia. After the war, through the sale of valuable stamps confiscated from the Jews, he reaches the heights of his ambition by building his own hotel. He becomes a millionaire; but with the arrival of communism, he loses everything. Sent to inspect mountain roads, Ditie comes to terms with his dreary circumstances, his place in history, and the inevitability of his death.

Well, yes, but it’s so much more. The height of Ditie’s ambition is his wish to be accepted and respected, especially by other hotel owners. He earns his million and develops his hotel visited by famous guests but never attains the acceptance or respect of other hotel owners. The owners visit his hotel but ignore Ditie and the hotel’s most fabulous attractions. Later, when millionaires are rounded up for jail, Ditie takes offense that he is excluded from their ranks. But the book is about so much more than his ambition. In the background lies the history of Czechoslovakia under Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and Edvard Beneš, the German occupation of Bohemia, German atrocities during World War II (including the destruction of Lidice), and the communist takeover early in 1948.

Everyone longs for something in the book but Ditie moves beyond trying to fulfill physical pleasures and seeks his place in the world, during life and death. He initially learns to “read” people as a pupil of the headwaiter at a Prague hotel, who perceptively understands each patron and his desires. When asked how he correctly analyzes a customer and knows so much in advance, the headwaiter responds “I served the King of England.” Ditie’s experience highlights how meaningless such an honor can be—after serving the Emperor of Ethiopia (accidentally at first, then by the Emperor’s choice) Ditie is suspected of stealing a gold spoon. His honor in ruins, he unsuccessfully attempts to hang himself.

Underneath the comic and dramatic events lies a dark aspect of man. Ditie does not evaluate his acquisition of wealth through the theft of valuable stamps from the Jews until bad things happen to him. He doesn’t think twice about abandoning his autistic son, the product of approved coupling by the Third Reich, until haunted by the boy’s talent. The millionaires’ prison receives Hrabal’s special scorn. Despite describing the behavior in the running of the prison as “real comedy, beyond Chaplin’s wildest imagination”, there lies a depressing aspect of man willing to forego freedom for a soft life. Ditie gives up his freedom because he wants to be accepted as one of the rich (this after his humiliation in order to marry a German woman). Hrabal’s scorn is balanced when Ditie’s work assignments take him to the border, where he begins to understand his place in history. Ditie earns more knowledge of human nature than the headwaiter claimed to have from serving the King of England. Ditie’s knowledge, though, comes through solitude and reflection and demonstrates that the unbelievable really can true.

The moment I looked out and saw, to my surprise, how high the snow had reached, I saw my cottage with the animals in it suspended on a chain hung from heaven itself, a cottage banished from the world and yet full to the brim, just like those mirrors with their buried and gorgotten images, images that could be summoned up as easily as the images I put in the mirrors, as the images I littered and lined my road with, covered now by the snow of the past, so that memory could find it only by touch, the way an experienced hand feels the pulse under the skin, to determine where life had flowed, flows, and will flow. And at that moment I began to be afraid, because if I died, all the unbelievable things that had come true would vanish, and I remembered that the professor of aesthetics and French literature had said that the better person was the one who expressed himself better. And I longed to write everything down just as it was, so others could read it and from what I said to myself paint all the pictures that had been strung like beads, like a rosary, on the long thread of my life, unbelievable beads that I had managed to catch hold of here as I looked out the window and marveled at the falling snow that had half buried the cottage. And so every evening, when I sat in front of the mirror with the cat behind me on the bar, butting her little head against my image in the mirror as though the image were really me, I looked at my hands while the blizzard roared outside like a swollen river, and the longer I looked at my hands—and I would hold them up as though I were surrendering to myself—the more I saw winter ahead of me, and snow. I saw that I would shovel the snow, throwing it aside, searching for the road, and go on, every day, searching for the road to the village, and perhaps they would be looking for a way to get to me too. And I said to myself that during the day I would look for the road to the village, but in the evening I would write, looking for the road back, and then walk back along it and shovel aside the snow that had covered my past, and so try, by writing, to ask myself about myself.
(From the translation by Paul Wilson in the New Directions edition)

Highest recommendation.

For additional excerpts from the novel:

It was a magnificent sight

Worthy of inseminating an Aryan with dignity

A match saved with his energetic whistle

I’m going to skip reviewing the movie version of the novel (there are many changes from the text, often to good effect) directed by Jiri Menzel, other than to recommend it—very enjoyable.