The Ear (1970, Karel Kachyňa) (Patreon)

61/100

How would you behave if you strongly suspected—worked on the assumption, more or less—that your home is bugged and corrupt government officials are eavesdropping on everything you say and do? What's fascinating about The Ear is how bizarrely cynical its answer to that question turns out to be, in a way that I never remotely anticipated. Felt a bit restless for much of its first half, despite Kachyňa's expert control of light and shadow and the paranoid atmosphere thereby generated; Anna and Ludvík's combative sniping plays like Albee's George and Martha minus the caustic wit (or the younger couple as threatening mirror image; the film's mostly a duet), quickly becoming repetitive. And I never quite got a secure hold on the flashbacks to whatever function it was that they'd attended earlier in the evening, though I suspect that's mostly due to my own ignorance of the political context. Certainly it seems clear that Kachyňa didn't deliberately fashion a Kafka-esque parable in which our protagonists' ostensible crimes against the state are unknown and fundamentally unknowable—there are specific connections to be made between what was said at the party and what worries them in its aftermath, and I'd probably appreciate The Ear significantly more had I at least a vague understanding of what said connections are. As is, I'm left clinging to those bits and pieces that transcend Communist ideology, e.g. Ludvík gamely attempting to comfort himself by reasoning that So-And-So wouldn't have referred to Anna by her first name were things potentially grim for them. Had that been the entire movie, I'd have found relatively little to admire.

Everything changes, however, around the midpoint, when a bunch of party officials (some of whom seem to have been lurking outside for a while, though it's unclear whose house they're surveilling) suddenly drop by for a visit. The scene itself is fairly brief, though magnificently ominous—loved the utter lack of convincing pretense with which their apparent leader, who'd leaned on the gate's buzzer for several minutes until they finally opened up, claimed that he'd pressed it just once and it had somehow gotten stuck. "I will now tell an obvious lie and you have no choice but to accept it" being a hallmark of totalitarianism. But a truly remarkable shift occurs shortly after the officials leave, when Anna stumbles upon a listening device hidden between kitchen appliances. In theory, this should come as no surprise: Not only have both Anna and Ludvík repeatedly referred to "the ear" that they assume constantly monitors them, but Anna keeps directly addressing it—sometimes to goad Ludvík (by saying aloud things that might potentially get him into trouble), sometimes to allay possible suspicions. At one point, when Ludvík becomes violent, she actually screams for whoever's listening to help her, like Laura Linney's "wife" in The Truman Show. And yet the discovery of a bona fide bug, instantly transforming the surveillance state from hypothetical to actual, causes both of them to snap, tearing their house apart in an effort to find all of the other bugs that have been planted. (Bear in mind, this film predates The Conversation by four years. Though it can't have influenced Coppola, since the Czech government suppressed it until 1990.) So strongly does The Ear finish, even if the final scene itself feels a tad abrupt, that I feel guilty for holding its earlier tedium and impenetrability against it, especially since the latter rates to be more my own issue than the film's. If nothing else, it's a thought-provoking exploration of the epistemological chasm separating what we believe to probably be true from what we know to be true.