La plaisanterie

"Optimism is the opiate of mankind. A 'refreshing spirit' stinks of stupidity. Long live Trotsky! Yours, Ludvik". With this sarcasm, Ludvik (Josef Somr) has insulted his lover, a loyal Communist, who brings this blasphemy to the attention of the Party. In a public vote, he is unanimously condemned, expelled from the Party, the University and required to serve under harsh conditions in the military for six years. In mass egalitarian states, leadership is impelled to guarantee happiness and his "joke" is seen as a serious attack on what is nowadays called "The Politics of Joy." We see the Czechs celebrating their glorious government building a glorious future, while Josef Somr, projects cynicism and detachment skillfully, as he plots revenge. Milan Kundera's novel was a surprising and popular revelation from behind the "Iron Curtain," making this adaptation inevitable.

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.

A vehement indictment of Czech's Communist Party cropping up in the aftermath of Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact invasion, THE JOKE is the politically engagé Jaromil Jires' sophomore feature, adapted from Milan Kundera's novel and banned immediately after its release, it has been hailed as the last keystone of Czech New Wave movement. Nevertheless, viewed as an independent art piece shorn of its erstwhile political context, it still can hold courts in terms of Jires' nifty visual and editing modality, but at the same time, is severely undermined by several unsavory blemishes, not least its blinkered misogynous treatment.

In 1968, a middle-aged scientist Ludvik Jahn (Somr) returns to Prague after almost two decades and gestates a vengeance to his former college schoolmates, who have expelled him from both the college and party due to a facetious "Long Live Trotsky" postcard he sends to his sweetheart Marie (Obermaierová) to cheer her up. The joke recoils badly and Ludvik is sent to "re-education" in the military where sadistic corporeal punishment is subject to those political dissenters. In the face of the film's 20-year-apart past-and-present correlation, Jires adopts an impetuous cross- cutting technique to juxtapose those two time-frames together, often predicating upon the incidents in the present time (a celebration of newborn babies, a music rehearsal of his old band-mates etc.), which evoke Ludvik's memory of tonally diametrical situations, and subjective angle is also craftily applied to give the audience a vantage point of a haphazard-ish narrative.

So, Ludvik's half-baked plan is to seduce Helena (Dítetová) ("Why don't you grow a pair?"), the wife of Pavel (Munzar), who is his former friend and treacherously betrays him in the trial of his "joke". His plan works, to our utter incredulity because Somr's Ludvik is the antithesis of his dashing counterpart in Kundera's source novel, a bald, portly, reticent type, inept in his action and disaffected in his cynical gaze, so, the reason why Helena falls for him so hard is a total myth and very much contrived, loneliness maybe, but as a successful TV anchorwoman, she is not shy of suitors, even younger, prettier ones. It is a plain pathetic male wish-fulfillment in establishing Helena as a desperate erotomaniac albeit Dítetová's willed attempts to extract some compassion out of her poorly devised character arc, and overall, the female characters are either a masochistic cougar, a priggish party devotee, or a candy-floss trophy girlfriend, no wonder Ludvik frankly admits that he prefers whores.

To shame a man by sleeping with his wife, the stratagem itself is petty, malicious and misogynous to a fault, if Jires' intention is to make Ludvik a miserable reprobate, he has it on a silver platter. A trenchant reproof of an inequitable polity or a pessimistic take on an individual's ingrown corruption? THE JOKE begins as the former but ends up in close proximity of the latter, that is a letdown with a capital L.

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.

Kundera is one of the most enjoyable Central/East European authors of the post-war period and that is because he wrote a number of books with a very simple, and flavorful, message: we fight totalitarianism by simply not caring about it; adultery is one very good way to be a dissident. Ludvik Jahn served in a non-combatant military unit, then spent a year in a prison (without conviction) and had to work for six years in the mines (for lack of university degree) just because his colleagues and Party comrades took very seriously a stupid joke he wrote to his beloved for absolutely personal reasons. Jahn's revenge had to take the form of a joke because his major concern was namely that: how could these men take so seriously an innocent charade? Yet, his joke turned out bad: instead of humiliating Pavel, the once leader of the students' party organization, by seducing his wife, Jahn humiliated the innocent, and naive, woman, broke the heart of her young suitor and, most unfortunately, had to realize that Pavel, the allegedly serious communist, fared much better in the field of adultery: enjoying the company of 20-year old attractive students who have absolutely no notion of Marxism and the construction of socialism. It is through this realization, and not so much through his earlier ostracization, that Ludvik is confronted with the consequences of his own misplaced joke. His lonely protest against the system failed.

ADDED IN 2009: now, that Kundera was revealed to have himself denounced a "capitalist spy" to the police authorities and thus contributed to the long-term prison/correction camp sentences of several people, this book/movie develops in an unexpected dimension. Was it a deliberate, or subconscious way for Kundera to deal with his own guilt, a way to explain to his younger self that what he did, apparently out of good faith and sense of civic duty, at the age of 20, seemed nothing but utter stupidity at the age of forty?