Dir Jiri Menzel (DVD – of course; who goes to the cinema in these times?)
It was an interesting film to watch, but I didn’t really warm to it until I thought about it afterwards. I found the droll tone slightly alienating, but in retrospect no other was possible. (I even wondered if Wes Anderson had been influenced by it.)
Although it was set during WWII, there were shades of the Austro-Hungarian imperial bureaucracy that Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth and Miklos Banffy write about. The scene is a railway station in an out-of-the-way town, but even this backwater can’t escape rigid bureaucracy and the Nazi occupation. The station workers make accommodation between their duties and their interests: the stationmaster has his beloved pigeon coop, the train dispatcher is a great seducer, and Milos is trying to uphold the dignity of his position and get his end away. That sounds a bit Carry On, but it’s not played for obvious laughs. There’s a subtle slyness to it: Milos hints at his problem of premature ejaculation to the stationmaster’s wife as she massages grain down a goose’s throat. And who would have thought that inked rubber stamps could have been put to such surprisingly erotic use?
The filming is unusual: it’s nearly all from a static camera. This leads to carefully posed scenes, or very exact angles as moving objects come to a stop to reveal someone standing still. The exception is when Milos is forced to ride on the train, and suddenly the train is static and it’s the countryside that’s sweeping by. I suppose it’s a way to suggest that the characters are immoveable in their rustic world, while the trains chug through and bring the outside world. Milos’s love – Masa – is a bit of a fast women: she’s a conductor on the train.
It ends sadly, as you sort of know it must, with sex and death interlinked. What seems to be a slight satire on immaturity and hidebound bureaucracy in a backwater suddenly explodes into the tragedy of war as Milos – like his quixotic grandfather rather than his immobile father – sheds his passivity and fatally embraces active resistance.
Aides memoires part 2 