Loves of a Blonde (1965, Miloš Forman) (Patreon)

71/100

Second viewing, last seen 1995. Still have that opening "Hooligan" song stuck in my head two days later, even though I obviously don't know the words; it's a savvy bait-and-switch, promising a raucous, youthful energy that never subsequently materializes. Instead, we get a queasily funny, lightly depressive portrait of romantic disillusion, which I now suspect owes nearly as much to Ivan Passer as it does to Forman. (Passer also cowrote The Firemen's Ball, for which the extended "dance" sequence here functions as a trial run.) To some extent, Loves plays like three lengthy shorts strung together, even though we're following Andula on her tentative, naïve quest to escape the town's suffocating dreariness. It's not that the film feels programmatic, exactly—it just could perhaps have used a bit more structural variation, so that events don't unfold in big discrete chunks. Forman was apparently strongarmed into shooting some additional material for the U.S. market (which has since been removed), but it doesn't appear to have involved Andula, who remains somewhat opaque. At the same time, though, it's unexpectedly thrilling when Milda's parents abruptly steal focus in the home stretch, extemporizing a gender-swapped Honeymooners sketch (she's obstreperous, he's long-suffering) while poor Andula spends several minutes trying to figure out how to leave the locked building before finally giving up and knocking again. The concluding one-two punch of her lying to her friend about how wonderful it was before showing up to her dead-end factory job tells us everything we need to know, I suppose. Still, this is one of those movies in which I enjoy each individual moment while being a bit frustrated by the whole. "Shapeless" is a word I often use to describe that scenario, but Loves of a Blonde  has a very distinct shape. It's just kind of a lumpy one.