La plaisanterie

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.

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.

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.