Vesnicko má stredisková

My review was written in May 1986 after a Cannes Film Festival Market screening.

"My Sweet Little Village" finds director Jiri Menzel in the warm winning form of his "Capricious Summer" as well as other more recent of his pictures such as "Cutting It Short". This comedy about small-town life in Czechoslovakia is a modest but very entertaining opus, and elicited a rarely heard ovation at its conclusion upon screening in one of the smaller salles in the Cannes market.

Simple story emphasizes situation comedy and running gags as bumbling young Otik, thought by his friends and neighbors to be mentally retrded, is rejected by his older workmate, Mr. Pavel, on delivery jobs. Pavel is not the only one tired of Otik, as an influential type is working on getting the boy transferred to a job in Prague so his local house can be lucratively modernized and resold, complete with an "English garden".

There are all sorts of goofy local intrigues, such as the young married woman who is always conspiring to get Otik out of his house (one time he is sent off to catch a "must-see" Romanian film) so she can dally there undetected with her young boyfriend. The town doctor (Rudolf Hrusinsky) is forever crashing his car into almost everything in its path, and though he is sympathetic, he is given to talking his patients out of their symptoms rather than prescribing any treatment.

Using a lowkey, simple style that perfectly snatches the rural setting and unsophisticated characters. Menzel very warmly coaxes humor out of familiar material. Some of his running gags are priceless and no matter what happens, including inevitable physical violence (as in the cuckolded husband's reaction), there is no hint of malie here. Menzel very gently pokes fun at the provincialism of his countrymen, in a universal way, as when two guy discuss how the bra-less look has caught on in the West -and how glad they are it has spread as far as their village.

Cast is uniformly excellent as an ensemble, with stalwart Rudolf Hrusinsky particularly delicious as the doctor.

A pleasant comedy with several laugh-out-loud moments. A cross between an Abbott and Costello comedy (with roles reversed), and the drama of Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men". Well worth watching.

I watched this movie for about 30 minutes, as I understand it already touched upon everything that happens in the village. One of the main characters is an autistic person, "a village idiot". I felt pain watching this person. However "authentic" the portrayal of the village in the 80s in Czechoslovakia might be, I am not sure I can feel the humor here as so many situation show relatively pitiful existence of the village idiot. Though it is great to see that the community is making an effort at helping him adapt, it is also taking advantage of him. It is the reality, but from the perspective of me, a person living in an urban setting, where various things are done to make disabled feel more empowered, the village community seems some steps behind. As portraying this condition, which can never be helped ('he either strikes or has killed himself') -- the movie is very very sad, not a comedy at all. I still gave it 4/10, because of the atmosphere of the village that it creates, and it is very interesting from historical perspective.

The doctor keeps crashing his car, the lorry driver is fed up with his simpleton mate and plots to move him to Prague, the girls no longer wear bras and there's flirting, drunkenness, infidelity, and even the odd punch-up. There are hints of darker bureaucratic inadequacies (this film was made in the final years of the Communist regime), but director Jiří Menzel's loving observations of Czech village life are wryly humorous, and this is principally a gentle and affectionate paean in which nothing much happens except the ebb and flow of village life — the eternal nature of which is hinted at by the circular ending. A subtle joy from start to finish. Czech DVD has moderately reliable English subtitles.

I don't know how many movies from the Eastern Bloc people in the US got to see during the '80s. Among the good ones were the Soviet Union's "Voyenno-polevoy roman" ("Wartime Romance" in English) and Hungary's "Jób lázadása" ("The Revolt of Job" in English).

And then there's Jirí Menzel's Academy Award-nominated "Vesnicko má stredisková" ("My Sweet Little Village" in English). This lighthearted Czechoslovakian comedy focuses on a couple of things. The main plot is the relationship between truck driver Pávek and his colleague Otík, who has trouble understanding things (it's not clear if he's merely simple-minded or developmentally disabled). But then there's also an unfulfilled wife's trysts with a veterinarian, and a teenage boy's obsession with a local teacher. Quite a bit's going on in this town.

The characters, while flawed, are shown to be well-meaning. One thing that I noticed was that the teenage boy had a shirt saying UNIVERSITY UTAH. I will forever wonder how someone in a small town in the Eastern Bloc got his hands on such a shirt. Other than that, some of the characters' hairdos mark this as an '80s movie. Not a masterpiece, but an enjoyable one. Screenwriter Zdenek Sverák, who also appears as the painter, is best known for the Oscar-winning "Kolya".

Probably worth mentioning that the R in the director's name has a diacritic, but IMDb no longer allows diacritics on consonants.