Zert

(1969) The Joke/ Zert (In Czechoslovakia with English subtitles) POLITICAL DRAMA

Adapted from the book "Zert" by Milan Kundera co-written and directed by Jaromil Jires that has Ludvík Jahn (Josef Somr) meeting Helena Zemánková (Jana Dítetová) we find out later he was trying to seduce her. At first the reason was oblivious, but as it turned out through flashbacks it was a grudge to get back at the person who got him in trouble 15 years earlier.

It started out a little slow but it picks up as the movie is progressing with plenty of dialogue that resorts to nothing much but satisfaction for the star who is a clarinet player.

This film, one of the most celebrated of the Czech New Wave, is often commended as a bravely anti-communist work. I do not agree with that assessment.

This film was produced by a state-run, Party controlled studio. It attracted a great audience to the state-run cinemas of the time. While it certainly details the injustices and abuses of the Stalinist era in the Eastern Bloc countries of the late '40s and early '50s, its most sympathetically portrayed character is not the once-purged-now- successful revenge-bent scientist at the center of the narrative. Rather, the most impressive character we see is the main character's rival and target: a once proud idealist who danced seductively to the traditionalist folk-hymns embraced during the enactment of Czeck socialism, and who partook in the Stalinist committees popular at the time, he now teaches Marxism to the sex-and-drugs celebrating children of the late '60s and embraces their cultural revolution.

The cynical "protagonist" knows only anger over past wrongs, which is to say resentment. The commie true-believer moves forward with history and its evolving paradigms of love and joy. I would define this film as a Nietzschean, rather than as an anti-Marxist (or Marxist) work.

In the early 1950s, Josef Somr was a university student and a member of the Communist Party. Then he was denounced by another student for being a pessimist and a Trotskyite. He was expelled from the Party and University and sentenced to a work brigade that nearly broke him. Now he lives somewhere, but is visiting his old town, seeking revenge. He finds that things have changed, but he has not. He tries to get his vengeance by sleeping with his accuser's wife, but nothing he does seems to have any effect.

It's a sad movie, with a strong subtext about the futility of vengeance, that occasionally breaks surface, along with a strong religious sense. It's also a bit of a diagetic musical picture, with modern march tunes which praise the workers and their allies, alternating with old folk tunes closer to the characters' hearts. It's a late entry in the Czech Spring movement that somehow escaped the censors.

A movie adaptation that succeeds by remaining true to the novel's theme while telling the story with an exciting new structure and style. As opposed to the novel's use of more conventional flashback passages, in the film the past seems to attack Ludvik Jahn -- played brilliantly by Josef Somr of CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS -- from all sides, as the past echoes inescapably through the world of the present. It also doesn't hurt, I suppose, that Kundera himself co-wrote the screenplay.

Finally got to watch the film, based on Milan Kundera's wonderful novel--a film banned in the former Czechoslovakia for some 20 years after its initial release in theatres...thanks to a kind soul for uploading it on utube. The tale is a scathing indictment of Communists and Leftist totalitarian regimes worldwide, some existing to this day. Director Jiromil Jires and Kundera who was the co-scriptwriter, left out some minor details from the book relating to the actions of offspring the protagonist Ludwig's main tormentor and classmate. The film is aided by an amazing performance by the lead actor Josef Somr (who died last year), perhaps more famous for his turn in Jiri Menzel's "Closely Watched Trains" (Oscar winning film for Best Foreign Language film). The film belongs to Kundera, Somr and Jires, in that order.