Il gioco della mela

During the Eastern Europe viewing challenge on ICM I've been following the progress of other participants over the month. Having found a number of auteur film maker Vera Chytilova's work interesting,I was intrigued to see praise for a Chytilova I've not heard of before,I picked up a fruit of a paradise.

Note:Some spoilers in review.

View on the film:

Bobbing for apples a year after a ban was lifted on her not directing again after international pressure from the film community and her writing a letter to President Gustav Husak over her support of socialism, co-writer/(with Kristina Vlachova) directing auteur Vera Chytilova makes a blazing return to cinema, busting open with Czech New Wave (CNW) ultra-stylisation in frenzied criss-crossing between human births and apples falling from the tree. Dipping the CNW into the French New Wave via shooting "on the spot" in real,dingy locations,Chytilova & cinematographer Frantisek Vlcek continue building on the unpredictable fluidity of Chytilova's camera moves, spun from lightening fast pans around the maternity ward, to floating dolly shots bringing out an intimate atmosphere for Josef's liaisons.

Less outwardly political than her past (and what would later be,future) work, the screenplay by Chytilova and Vlachova continues to build on Chytilova's major theme across her work of expressing femininity,with a winning zest. Happily playing away between Anna and his wife like a little boy, the writers intelligently find the political underneath the skin,where Anna (played by an enticingly expressive Dagmar Blahova) tears off the fantasied nurse outfit which John (played by a perfectly meek,fellow CNW film maker Jiri Menzel) has become tied to,in order to peel away to her inner independence, maturely minded self,with Anna picking up the fruit of paradise.

Vera Chytilova's first film after she'd been banned from the screen several years by the ever-fickle censors--which ended so many Czech directorial careers outright after Prague Spring--is a basically apolitical farce that nonetheless has some of her usual anarchic playfulness. Fellow director Jiri Menzel plays the typically self-absorbed male doctor who is continually run rings around by the women around him, including the one he impregnates--and decides he's willing to commit to only when she's realized she's better off without him.

The role-reversed battle-of-the-sexes stuff is amusing if not terribly interesting or original (at least anymore), and the film suffers from what appears to be a low budget--it's technically a little rough by her standards, and thus not as stylish. There are a few inspired moments (notably the heroine's over-the-top expression of clothes-shedding free-spiritedness during a countryside outing), but this strikes me as a relatively minor work, even though it's an interesting timepiece. And, needless to say, it's a lot less smirky and more feminist (if not necessarily more "sophisticated") than most sex comedies of its era.