Trains étroitement surveillés

It's amazing just how many visual sex metaphors director Jirí Menzel managed to cram into 92 minutes, without ever becoming ridiculous or losing the plot. It makes Hitchcock's train going into the tunnel shot from 'North By Northwest' look like the work of a rank amateur.

Ostensibly 'Closely Watched Trains' is the story of Trainee Milos Hrma (Václav Neckár) starting his job at the local train station during the Nazi occupation of what was then Czechoslovakia (only I guess it wasn't, because it was officially absorbed by the Reich). Throughout most of the film the war, complete with what the local Nazi functionary describes as "beautiful tactical withdrawals," is a long way off and Milos has more important matters to attend to. Specifically he's trying to lose his virginity and deal with another problem common to young men everywhere, one which the local doctor advises him to solve by thinking about football during critical moments.

Made in 1966, when some Czechs were clearly already looking ahead to 1968's Prague Spring, the film slyly uses the Nazis as a stand-in for the Soviets. As proof of this, and the Hollywood establishment's anti-Communist bent in the late 60s, 'Closely Watched Trains' won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1968. It is, however, imminently deserving of the win on its own merits.

History lessons aside 'Closely Watched Trains' is beautifully shot, well acted, and absurdly hilarious, while still tasting of tragedy. Excellent.

Closely Watched Trains is a a film to be watched again and again.

It's a coming-of-age type story that delves into the viewers psyche, young Milos who has some troubles with his girlfriend, seems to have this dwell on his life. And the world around him reacts, from the woman riding a horse to steam coming out of the train, the woman working her baking, and simply the movement of young Milos becoming a man in his own sense.

But this film isn't just a sexual innuendo, smart comedy presides through it all which most anyone can pick up on, a lot of it is sexual but not all. Making it a surprisingly upbeat film throughout, a rarity not just in a War film, but Czech cinema in general. This may make it sound a bit too happy but it definitely isn't. It's still a moving piece that demands repetitive watches.

Recommended for anyone with an interest in classic European cinema. If you are going to start watching Czech films, start with Closely Watched Trains.

I saw this film at film-school. Ever since, I have rated this film as one of the very best, its beauty, seriousness, sensualism and cinematography. It is all black and white, but so full of life. I am myself a cinematographer today.

Try to watch it.

When I saw this film, about twenty years ago, I knew nothing about Bohumil Hrabal, the author of the novel, and Jiri Menzel, the director. Later I knew about the situation that many talented people went through in Czechoslovakia after "The Prague springtime" and the invasion of the country by the soviet tanks in 1968. Now I am a fan of the czech sense of humour but I still remember that evening twenty years ago when I saw what was probably my first czech film and the enormous pleasure that causes me this almost perfect movie.

The explanation for the title of Jiri Menzel's film is that it was apparently derived from a military designation employed by the Germans who ran the railways in occupied Czechoslovakia, and would probably have indicated that the highest level of security was to be observed for the whole length of the railway system over which a train so designated had to pass.

'Closely Observed Trains' - its title in Britain is probably the better translation - sounds like the rambling memoir of some harmlessly eccentric train-buff: Gauge numbers, timetables, wheel configurations - that sort of thing! In fact, as we are finally shocked to realize, it describes precisely the munitions train which the Czech Resistance successfully target at the film's conclusion. The title is deeply ironic, therefore, since the seemingly innocent observance of ordinary life, that goes on in and around the country Station where the film is set, hides the seething secret of the meek and powerless, which is that, since their natural desire for life and happiness has been thwarted, they must encompass a more violent and final solution to their problems. With his death, the unhappy young trainee Václav becomes, not a hero! but the authentic representative of his desparate fellow countrymen, whose virility has become a mere joke - a land whose history has been stopped by occupation, and which therefore has no posterity.

It is, one might say, a land 'without issue' as obituary notices would put it. This adds a curious twist to the bottom-stamping scene: It reveals, behind the charming buffoonery, a society where even relations between the sexes must have an official, bureaucratic imprimatur - where, indeed, the pillars of society are themselves so perverted as to take their only sexual pleasure in feasting their elderly eyes on a young woman's (as it were) officially sanctioned nether regions. The more one thinks about it - as the blast blows Václav's hat back down the platform, and simultaneously forces us back into the film we have just seen through the shocking force of such an unexpected denoument - the more the German Occupation's stamps of approval must appear as a form of evirated official rape. Of the land, as of the girl, of course.

The explosion of the sabotaged munitions train wakes us from our comfortable and patronising sojourn in a Never-Never Land where charming and harmless buffoons exist merely for our own amusement, just as its repercussions signal the eventual destruction and extirpation from Czechoslovakia of just such patronising Nazi superiority. The film alerts us to the fact that the gentlest contempt is as cruel and destructive as the most brutal jackbooted hate: A collaborationist gesture is satirized, and the inky soul of bureaucracy is exposed.

The most decent and honest person in the film, apart from the young Conductress (who appears to be a Resistance agent), is Václav, largely because of what is conventionally seen as the tragedy of his doomed love-life: He is untainted by the conforming adult world around him - a tormented innocent, like Christ, and similarly destined to be mankind's saviour through suffering.

Perhaps his cap, rolling down the Station platform before the blast, represents the crown of thorns that every Czech had to pick up, before the new Rome of Hitler's Germany could be defeated? Certainly, this is not a sunny film. It is a film that demonstrates the necessity for the performance of the sternest duty: To suffer, and to die if necessary, for one's country. And by reading us this lesson without any of the rhetorical and false heroics of the conventional action-movie, Jiri Menzel refuses to excuse his audience from enlisting for such hard service; by definition, a conquered people have no heroes, so that they have no alternative but to struggle in small ways, accumulating the stature of a Nation organically. This is, after all, the only possible repudiation of the Nazi ideology of the Ubermensch.

Truly, 'the meek shall inherit the earth.'