Romanze für Flügelhorn

A very unusual and inspiring film by the prominent Czech director, who had the misfortune to live and work under the Communist regime.And yet...We know so many Russian,Polish,Bulgarian films of the greatest artistic value made and produced in the Evil Empire camp in spite of the brutal and relentless censorship, in spite of the horrendous ideological pressure. The film is very simple:a touching bitter-sweet summer-time love story of a young man (played with vibrant tenderness by Jaromir Hanzlik)and a girl from the travelling merry-go-round team. The boy is coming of age and is also interested - quite naturally- in the mature charm of another, older local woman.But his heart is stolen by the young and innocent girl. It smacks of a cheap melodrama... but there is a twist: Voita (the boy's name) has to take care of his dying grandfather. And here comes the clash between responsibility and passion.What will prevail in the boy's heart? The film breathes of poetic images, visual and musical.The hero's flashback of his first love echoes with our own recollections of our youth. It is an amazing and unexpected gem of a film left to us (over 40 years ago) by the patriarch of the Czech cinema.Bravo, Maestro!

There probably are not many movies whose screenplay is written by a poet based on his own poem. Well, this is the case. Frankly, I would never expect Mr. Vavra, who is best known for his historical epic on the Husite uprising in Bohemia and for some socialist realism before and after that, to make a film like this. The movie is extremely poetic, but at the same time, the visuals are firmly grounded in reality and the buzzing of insects in the outdoors is omnipresent. The plot is simple: a student is spending a summer back in his home village, taking care of his grandfather on his deathbed while dealing with his own "growing up". The movie allegedly contains the most erotic scene in Czechoslovak cinema - when the youngster watches a woman bathing in the river.

The title translates into English as "A Romance for Fluegelhorn". Ever since I saw the film for the first time, I have liked that instrument.