Les aventures d'Ivan Tchonkine

. . . the "satellite" being that of Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic. Jiri Menzel's earlier film, the 1969 LARKS ON A STRING (SKRIVANCI NA NITI) was banned for 21 years. When it was finally released in 1990 it won top price at the Berlin film festival. CHONKIN was released the same year as FORREST GUMP and there are some thematic similarities to M*A*S*H and CATCH-22. Along with many sly (and some not-so-sly) jabs at Soviet bureaucracy and military incompetence the film supplies some interesting views of human nature and shows how a slight change of perspective can skew reality beneficially or detrimentally.

While some aesthetes may complain the film is not as refined as earlier Menzel films the intellectual content is there . . . it just tends to be camouflaged with all the laughter. Although a Czech production, CHONKIN was filmed in Russian. There were a goodly number of Russians in the audience where I saw the film. Audience laughter had interesting patterns depending on the placements of the subtitles, which often appeared in English before the Russian lines were completely delivered. One of the nice things about subtitled films (if everything is, indeed subtitled) is that you needn't worry about dialogue drowned by laughter. And there was laughter a-plenty at this screening:)

Jiri Menzel, director of some lovely, poignant comedies in the 1960s before they were Banned For All Time by the Soviets, films this Czech 'Catch-22' like it was still 1966; the treatment of totalitarian terror as absurdist farce; the hackneyed eccentricity of village life; the amiably bumbling hero with unsuspected sexual prowess. Except 1994 is not 1966, and, the historical or political moment gone, Menzel is exposed, his ideas mouldy, his style threadbare, his comedy and irony as clunkingly gauche as the American 'Catch-22'. Loved the scene with the Jewish shoemaker called Stalin, though.