Une blonde émoustillante

The western world paid its dues to Jiri Menzel with Closely Watched Trains, Czechoslovak cinema enjoyed its time in the spotlight for about five years, then as the Soviet tanks moved in on Prague and the UN sat and watched in carefully outraged anticipation, Milos Forman and a bunch of people left for greener pastures, those who stayed behind to make movies devised new ways to sidestep and confuse the Soviet mechanism, and everyone else went home to find the next New Wave/foreign national school of cinema to praise in dumbfounded amazement that movies were actually made outside of LA, Rome, and Paris. Ironically enough, the legendary Filmove Studio Barrandov that lent considerable resources at the hands of the Czech New Wave are now hiring out to major Hollywood productions.

My girlfriend is half-Czech which means I'm very lucky to get an insider's view of that culture. It's also funny because she doesn't know the famous Oscar material, Closely Watched Trains or Firemen's Ball or The Shop on Main Street, but she was showing me the other day a VHS of a 1931 comedy that is apparently a family favourite. I perfectly understand that because I'm Greek and Theo Angelopoulos is only discussed/ridiculed as "artsy" for his pretentiously long shot by people who haven't sat through one of his movies - he is the prestige cinema we export and send to Cannes every so many years but it's not what we watch as a peoples. Anyway, I wouldn't have seen this otherwise and I've seen no one mention it.

This is one of those movies the Criterion establishment has not managed to salvage for a world audience yet remains a household national classic in its home country. And it's not one of those movies that don't translate well because, like Closely Watched Trains or most Czech New Wave films for that matter, the humour is mostly physical and visual in the manner of silent cinema, the characters are drawn in identifiable ways because we may need cultural context to understand a ronin or a geisha but a neglectful boss is a neglectful boss in any language, although this is what Italians did in their spaghettis and the Czech always refined/elevated their characters above simple stereotype. Thus the fake priest in Fararuv Konec does the small village better spiritual service than the real ones and the leering doctor in this one is painted in gentlemanly colors. It's the comedy of the running gag and the pratfall so that the viewer is not even required to understand/decipher the political allegory behind it to at least enjoy it. Indeed a running gag in the film is the mention of silent comedian Lupino Lane and the owners of the brewery where the film takes place complain, when one of their meetings is turned into chaos and mockery, that this is not a Charlie Chaplin movie.

This is a movie where the brewery manager's earnest attempts at professionalism and seriousness are sidetracked by a mocking universe where a motorcycle will never start and where his annoying, loud-voiced, brother destroys his domestical peace, at some degree Bohumil Hrabal takes a jab at the unbearable lightness of being, or as the wife says about her husband who moves around in a constant scowl, with slumped shoulders, "he has the muscles of a gladiator but he feels like a skinned rabbit". But this is also a movie about the wife, the beautiful radiant woman whom everyone at the small village oogles at and yet who glides around life like a breeze, allowing nothing to cling to her, nothing to molest that purity of life and character, and as a testament to the kind of optimist lifeaffirming film Jiri Menzel is doing, that purity is never put to a test, is never groped at or corrupted by outside circumstances. The beauty of this comes with a question; would the husband be the grouch he is if his wife wasn't as breezy as she is? Or better yet, if a person in a relationship takes the lightness for herself, does that mean the other must by necessity shoulder the unbearableness of that lightness? The end is a happy one, like the silent comedians reserved for their audience. By the same token, this is cinema that addresses a broad audience but does so in a simple refined manner. Good stuff.

I love Menzel movies and this one is my favorite of all of them. Even it's into my ten favorite movies of all time, like The Godfather, Blade Runner, The man who shot Liberty Valance, Amarcord or La vida en un hilo. It's poetical, romantic, erotic and funny. A kind of humor that moves from intelligent talk to the purely slapstick, but always in a universal way, that everybody can appreciate and enjoy.It's a movie that tries to make you feel how pretty are love and life, and if you let your senses and soul go into the story, when the movie finishes you can feel yourself better than at the beginning. Enjoy this movie so you'll enjoy life...and beer.

And not only for Easterners. Of course, it is clearly not the cheap and easy humour you can face in that kind of slapstick silly comedies from Hollywood nowadays.

As many times in the tandem Hrabal/Menzel, the film exudes sense of humour, "joie de vivre" and natural acting. Characters are full of charm, flesh and blood, and life... yes, Central European life after WWI (some visits to the area are still a good help in order to take better understanding... but be careful because later the understanding becomes LOVE forever, I can assure)

Just waiting the next one by Menzel, based on another classic by Bohumil Hrabal: I served the King of England.

Personal note: I have been in love with Maryska (literary homage by Hrabal to his mother)since the blessed day I read the first lines in the book... some years ago.

To me, this is the best movie ever. I could watch it over and over again for a thousand times! The scene, the characters, the dialogues, the situation, the colors, the feeling! Ah, that sweet nostalgia! And the whole movie mixed with an elegant little comedy. This film is truly the one to give you joy and courage through life. I guess you need to be able to receive the feeling that just comes from this movie. Anyone who has seen a peaceful little Middle-European town would appreciate this movie. Anyone who hasn't can do it with this film. Go out and get it!

This is the only film that makes me salivate. Yes, for a glass of Czech beer, a plate of pork and the beautiful Magda Vášáryová. It's a fond look at the lives of writer Bohumil Hrabal's parents in pre-war Czechoslovakia — father a put-upon brewery manager, mother sensual and flirtatious — and his eccentric, Švejk-like Uncle Pepin, who arrives uninvited and doesn't leave.

There's a lot of smiling and larking about, in and around the small-town brewery that was their home, and even those suffering injuries as a result seem to laugh at them. Utopian and nostalgic maybe, but why not? Nowadays we'd call it "feelgood". And that horse pissing — unscripted, surely (!) but the actors cope and director Jiří Menzel leaves it in to add to the mayhem.

I read the book years ago, but didn't realise until much later that Menzel had filmed it: what joy! Hrabal's breathless prose style is probably impossible to capture on screen, but the essence of the short story is not. In Menzel's loving hands the result is such a beautiful film, tender, whimsical, joyful, sensual, life-enhancing. I'd say that Postřižiny is definitely on a par with his better-known Ostře Sledované Vlaky (Closely Observed Trains), perhaps even superior as it benefits from more modern production quality, and colour. Such a shame it is not better known in the west — definitely our loss! But the Czech DVD has fairly good English subtitles for those unfortunates like myself who cannot speak the language, so now there is no excuse for not seeking out this gem.

Incidentally, Hrabal grew up in the brewery at Nymburk, east of Prague, but the film was actually shot at the Dalešice brewery further south in Moravia. Was the chimney there as tall, I wonder...?