movietrail

I ran into this piece while looking for "Rent"...

Fortunately "Rent" was out for the weekend, otherwise I might not have encountered this musical from a part of the world I am most unfamiliar with.

The Japanese title is, unexplainedly "Prague!!", but then again how else might a Japanese marketer give the local moviegoer the idea that this is not your average campy musical?

After settling into the novelty that this is a movie set in the former Czechoslovakia, and as a musical oddly interspersed with Petula Clark numbers sung in Czech, and with Twiggy dancers splashed all over the screen in sequence after sequence, the harsh reality of the society that is the backdrop of several happy-go-lucky soon- to-graduate high schoolers comes subtly into play, with no bashing you over the head that this is a communist country in transition.

Though I somehow doubt that a provincial Czech town in 1968 would have had the latest Carnaby Street fashions that the actresses were fond of wearing, it added to the sense of that wild and free time of life the protagonists were in, rather than catering to the reality which was likely a bit more subtle.

Knowing practically nothing about the culture and social background, I'm sure I must have missed more than a few references, but the message came through:

A group of high schoolers about to get out into the world live in a rapidly changing society longing to put Moscow's shadow in the past and join the "free" world. Tereza, the lovely protagonist, has a father who has taken advantage of the new political environment to open up a café on the edge of town. Her suitor Olda, is a symbol of the upstanding socialist who wants to take her to see the city lights of Moscow... but she can't stand him.

Into the scene walks in a band of young (and very handsome) army deserters posing as repairmen taking refuge in the lonely town church, where one of their uncles is the priest. Of course, Simon, the one with relatives in San Francisco is the one who falls in love with Tereza. Their goal is freedom in the West, but Simon gets waylaid with his feelings for Tereza, and who can blame him??

Meanwhile, the search is on for the deserters, and Tereza and her girlfriends have no idea who their new boyfriends are.

While it is honestly a little difficult to believe Tereza is merely 18, she plays it well, and the "summer of love" in a Czech village plays out for the 6 young people almost oblivious to the dark clouds that are gathering on the horizon. What happened after that is history, but the movie/musical shows it with humor and humanity as how it affected the average Czech family and personal relations.

If you like musicals with an element of seriousness but not played too darkly, this one is for you.

I felt this movie was as much about human sexuality as anything else, whether intentionally or not. We are also shown how absurd and paradoxical it is for women not to be allowed to such a nationally important event, meanwhile forgetting the pasts of our respective "advanced" nations. I write from Japan, where women merely got the right to vote 60 years ago, and female technical engineers are a recent phenomenon. Pubs in England were once all-male, the business world was totally off-limits for women in America until rather recently, and women in China had their feet bound so they couldn't develop feet strong enough to escape their husbands. Iran is conveniently going through this stage in our time, and we get a good look at how ridiculous we have all looked at one time or another. Back to the issue of sexuality, we are made to wonder what it may be intrinsically about women that make them unfit for a soccer game (the official reason is that the men are bad). Especially such boyish girls, a couple so much so that you even get the feeling that lesbianism is on the agenda as well. I think one point is that not all women are the same, and the women the police are trying to "protect" are not the ones who would try to get in in the first place. The opening scenes of the approach to the stadium makes you appreciate the valor of the young women trying to get in -- and each one separately -- at all. It is a brutish man's world. Any woman brave enough to try to go should be allowed! The world of sexuality is not one-size-fits-all.

Meanwhile, the apprehended criminal girls bond inside the makeshift pen awaiting their deportation to who-knows-where, and in a much more subtle way, begin to bond with the guards keeping watch over them. These had definite ideas about women and femininity, which were being challenged head-on. The change in attitude is glacial, but visible.

Since the movie is pure Iran from the first moment, it takes a little easing-into for the foreigner, but the characters have a special way of endearing themselves to you, and you end up getting the whole picture, and even understanding the men's misunderstandings and give them slack. The supposed villain is the unseen patriarchy of the Ayatollahs, which remain unseen and unnamed, and likely unremembered.

Knowing that this movie was filmed during the actual event of the Iran-Bahrain match gives me a feeling of awe for all involved.

I was a little apprehensive with the two leads -- the same leads in the movie "Down With Love" ! But, instead of trying to make the Potter and Warne characters more glamorous and beautiful than in real life (or making a cheesy romance out of it), they were portrayed as the two very down-to-earth (and likely very misunderstood), believable, and yes -- even homely -- people that they likely were. Not very familiar with Potter and her work, I was surprised to learn that she was also quite the naturalist, and was also reminded very much of "Wind in the Willows" from the same era; I believe the era when the British nature conservancy movement was likely taking root. I was always a great fan of Thornton W Burgess, whose main character was also named Peter Rabbit, who started writing just a decade after Potter for American readers (who, as children, would probably not have grasped the British nuances of Potter's work), and decided through watching this film that he must also have been greatly inspired by her. The realism and lack of (or at least toned-down) melodrama may make the film seem slow to formula-thirsty film-goers, but offers a lot of food for thought. The idea that you should follow your dreams is very Hollywood, but the dramatization of two very non-glamorous people and their romance (which -- surprise! doesn't necessarily make them more attractive) is almost revolutionary.