Closely Watched Trains (1966, Jiří Menzel) (Patreon)

45/100

It's not clear to me why pretty much everyone (myself emphatically included) hates Munich's climactic sex scene, but people tend to embrace the very same cringeworthy dynamic—a blunt conflation of ideological and libidinous impulses—when it's extended to the length of an entire feature. In this case, I struggled not to roll my eyes at the ostensibly counterintuitive juxtapositions, remaining unpersuaded that Nazi occupation makes a virgin's erectile dysfunction more interesting, or vice versa. Menzel (who wasn't yet 30 and had never previously directed anything longer than about 15 minutes*) places all of his faith in Hrabal's conceptual ambition, as if there's no need for specificity or nuance; Miloš' suicide attempt, in particular, feels as if it arrives out of nowhere, so perfunctory is his failed tryst with Máša (and so blandly genial is Václav Neckář's performance both beforehand and afterward). Only Hubička applying railway ink stamps to Zdenička's thighs and ass—a surprisingly erotic scene, especially when he has her apply breath to one of the stamps—generates enough intrinsic interest to avoid coming across as half of a programmatic disparity. (The young woman's indignant mother having her flash a bunch of bureaucrats makes for choice comedy, too, though of course it's counterbalanced by the sabotage plot because hey you got your antifa in my sex no you got sex on my antifa etc.) A minority opinion, obviously—won the Oscar, got a Criterion release, currently #461 on the They Shoot Pictures list—but it just seems blatantly facile to me. Either make The Shop on Main Street or make Loves of a Blonde. Making both simultaneously is jejune. Yes, I have the temerity to say that Menzel is talking to us out of jejunosity.

* Various shorts plus a segment of an omnibus film called Pearls of the Deep, which is 105 minutes long; dividing by five directors and subtracting time for the credits still leaves you with ~15 minutes, maybe 20.