Trains étroitement surveillés

Note to American viewers: "Closely Watched Trains" (1966) is one of them "fereign films". It has subtitles and is in black and white (actually a strength as it is superb film stock). The setting is German-occupied Czechoslovakia during WWII. The setting and the use of the Czech resistance movement (to the German occupation) as a plot element may confuse Americans; many of who believe that Czechoslovakia was an Axis country or have never given the subject any thought. But just prior to the start of the war, Britain and France sold out Czechoslovakia. They backed out of their treaties and allowed Hitler to break up the country; establishing the German Protectorates of Bohemia and Moravia and annexing the Sudentenland (which had a significant German population).

Also useful in understanding the film was a revisionist trend by European countries in the 1960's to rehabilitate their images; suppressing any record of cooperation/assistance to Germany while proclaiming their resistance to the Nazi agenda. The film is a product of this trend which is why the resistance elements seem rather tenuously inserted into the story.

The film revolves around young Milos Hrma (Vaclav Neckar) who follows his father's example and goes to work for the railroad; becoming an apprentice dispatcher at a rural station. The impressionable Milos becomes fascinated with Hubicka, a veteran train dispatcher who devotes most of his energy to various on-the-job seductions. The second act involves Hubicka's on-going conflict with their superior, the pigeon-raising and feather covered stationmaster.

But "Watched Trains" is really Milos' coming of age story, complete with the requisite line: "is the first time you have been with a woman?" Milos' first time proves a disaster and leads to an unsuccessful suicide attempt.

Meanwhile, it turns out that Hubicka has more on his mind than girls. He is a member of the Czech resistance and is planning to destroy a German munitions train when it passes near the station. Unfortunately for Milos, Hubicka's recreational activities are reported to the authorities and he must attend an investigatory hearing inside the station, scheduled for the same time that the ammunition train is expected. For Milos, who has finally demonstrated his manhood in bed, the question is whether he can now demonstrate it my climbing the signal tower and dropping an explosive device onto the train as it passes beneath.

The film goes out with a bang and one is left to decide on the relative merits of the two methods young men have of proving their manhood.

I forgot to mention that the film is actually a comedy. And for that matter the resistance movement stuff is pretty much an irrelevant side story to the coming of age theme. And the female characters are all a little too good.

As tends to happen with good little movies, the plot has very little to do with what the movie is about, and nothing to do with the effect it had on me. And as tends to happen with them "fereign" films there are allegorical elements. The characters are seen from Milos' innocent point of view, a nontraditional hero who is neither heroic nor particularly intelligent. But he does fall in love and that reshapes his destiny.

All in all a very entertaining production. Especially good is Jitka Zelenohorská as a female telegraph operator, who becomes the object of Hubicka's playful attentions.

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

Closely Watched Trains is my favorite movie ever. It is 90 minutes of cinematic perfection: funny, sad, exquisitely shot, beautiful to look at (watch it twice, so that the second time around you can focus on Menzel's genius in composing his shots), and insightful--profound, even. Its structure will make any film student drool with envy. The acting is flawless, particularly the performance by Josef Somr as train-dispatcher Hubicka. Please resist any impulse to see it as a "political" film--it is nothing of the sort. It's just a beautiful work of art. Note: Closely Watched Trains won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1967.

The reason to watch "Closely watched trains" again was the death of Jiri Menzel in september 2020. Jiri Menzel was part of the Czech new wave in the early '60s, of which Milos Forman was the main protagonist. The films of the directors of this movement were often not explicit political, but implicit they were socially critical nonetheless.

In both "Closely watched trains" and "The Firemen's Ball" (1967, Forman) the comrades are far from model workers. They prefer to be lazy above being tired. This is beautifully illustrated in the beginning scene of "Closely watched trains" in which main character Milos Hrma (Vaclav Neckar) prepares for his first working day on a minor train station, a job he selected because of the expected lack of workload.

In 1966 Menzel was not blamed for the implicit criticism in "Closely watched trains". In the first place the "Spring of Prague" was still going on and in the second place the story was situated during the Second World War and not during Communist domination. The situation had totally changed when "Larks on a string" (1969) was released. This time the "Spring of Prague" was over after the invasion in 1968 and the story was situated after the "liberation" from the Germans. After "Larks on a string" the career of Menzel came to a standstill. Worth mentioning is that both films were based on a novel by Bohumil Hrabal. Menzel liked to adapt books of this author to the screen.

Having not much to do during working hours, there is a lot of flirtation on the workplace. We can see that in "Loves of blonde" (1965, Milos Forman) as well as in "Closely watched trains". This is were the problems for Milos begin, because he suffers from premature ejaculation. This gives rise to performance anxiety towards that nice conductress he has an eye on. During the whole film there are sexual undertones, such as in the scene in which a peasant woman feeds up a goose by massaging his neck.

The combination of war time and coming of age shares "Closely watched trains" with "Lacombe Lucien" (1974, Louis Malle). In "Lacombe Lucien" the boy chooses the part of the Germans and abuses the power he obtained in this way against a Jewish girl. In "Closely watched trains" the boy choose to cooperatie with the resistance to prove that he is a real man. The end of the film is tragic and contrasts strongly with the bittersweet tone of the rest of the movie.

The explanation for the title of Jiri Menzel's film is that it was apparently derived from a military designation employed by the Germans who ran the railways in occupied Czechoslovakia, and would probably have indicated that the highest level of security was to be observed for the whole length of the railway system over which a train so designated had to pass.

'Closely Observed Trains' - its title in Britain is probably the better translation - sounds like the rambling memoir of some harmlessly eccentric train-buff: Gauge numbers, timetables, wheel configurations - that sort of thing! In fact, as we are finally shocked to realize, it describes precisely the munitions train which the Czech Resistance successfully target at the film's conclusion. The title is deeply ironic, therefore, since the seemingly innocent observance of ordinary life, that goes on in and around the country Station where the film is set, hides the seething secret of the meek and powerless, which is that, since their natural desire for life and happiness has been thwarted, they must encompass a more violent and final solution to their problems. With his death, the unhappy young trainee Václav becomes, not a hero! but the authentic representative of his desparate fellow countrymen, whose virility has become a mere joke - a land whose history has been stopped by occupation, and which therefore has no posterity.

It is, one might say, a land 'without issue' as obituary notices would put it. This adds a curious twist to the bottom-stamping scene: It reveals, behind the charming buffoonery, a society where even relations between the sexes must have an official, bureaucratic imprimatur - where, indeed, the pillars of society are themselves so perverted as to take their only sexual pleasure in feasting their elderly eyes on a young woman's (as it were) officially sanctioned nether regions. The more one thinks about it - as the blast blows Václav's hat back down the platform, and simultaneously forces us back into the film we have just seen through the shocking force of such an unexpected denoument - the more the German Occupation's stamps of approval must appear as a form of evirated official rape. Of the land, as of the girl, of course.

The explosion of the sabotaged munitions train wakes us from our comfortable and patronising sojourn in a Never-Never Land where charming and harmless buffoons exist merely for our own amusement, just as its repercussions signal the eventual destruction and extirpation from Czechoslovakia of just such patronising Nazi superiority. The film alerts us to the fact that the gentlest contempt is as cruel and destructive as the most brutal jackbooted hate: A collaborationist gesture is satirized, and the inky soul of bureaucracy is exposed.

The most decent and honest person in the film, apart from the young Conductress (who appears to be a Resistance agent), is Václav, largely because of what is conventionally seen as the tragedy of his doomed love-life: He is untainted by the conforming adult world around him - a tormented innocent, like Christ, and similarly destined to be mankind's saviour through suffering.

Perhaps his cap, rolling down the Station platform before the blast, represents the crown of thorns that every Czech had to pick up, before the new Rome of Hitler's Germany could be defeated? Certainly, this is not a sunny film. It is a film that demonstrates the necessity for the performance of the sternest duty: To suffer, and to die if necessary, for one's country. And by reading us this lesson without any of the rhetorical and false heroics of the conventional action-movie, Jiri Menzel refuses to excuse his audience from enlisting for such hard service; by definition, a conquered people have no heroes, so that they have no alternative but to struggle in small ways, accumulating the stature of a Nation organically. This is, after all, the only possible repudiation of the Nazi ideology of the Ubermensch.

Truly, 'the meek shall inherit the earth.'

Closely Watched Trains is a a film to be watched again and again.

It's a coming-of-age type story that delves into the viewers psyche, young Milos who has some troubles with his girlfriend, seems to have this dwell on his life. And the world around him reacts, from the woman riding a horse to steam coming out of the train, the woman working her baking, and simply the movement of young Milos becoming a man in his own sense.

But this film isn't just a sexual innuendo, smart comedy presides through it all which most anyone can pick up on, a lot of it is sexual but not all. Making it a surprisingly upbeat film throughout, a rarity not just in a War film, but Czech cinema in general. This may make it sound a bit too happy but it definitely isn't. It's still a moving piece that demands repetitive watches.

Recommended for anyone with an interest in classic European cinema. If you are going to start watching Czech films, start with Closely Watched Trains.