Sara Batkie
“Good comedy should be about serious things,” director Jiří Menzel once said. “If you start to talk about serious things too seriously, you end up being ridiculous.” It’s a statement of purpose that was also a necessity for any work that came out of the Czech New Wave, which began in the mid-60s during Soviet occupation of the country. It was a time when any political statement had to be stealthy, lest it risk being censored or even banned. Directors like Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová, and Juraj Herz embraced an absurdist style of black comedy that smuggled subversive material in via heady symbolism. But one of the most enduring films of the movement is also one of the simplest: Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains, which won the 1968 Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
Based on Bohumil Hrabal’s novel, Closely Watched Trains is set in a provincial Czech town far from the battlefront of WWII but nonetheless beholden to its Nazi occupiers. It’s a sleepy place, marked by an adherence to the ticking of machinery and a reverence for uniforms, even if the men in them are mostly inept. In the opening scene we’re introduced to Miloš Hrma (pop star Václav Neckář) as he prepares for his first day as a train dispatcher. Miloš comes from a long line of bumblers and malingerers, including a magician grandfather who attempted to hypnotize invading German soldiers and got his head cut off by tanks for his trouble. Awkward and shy, Miloš seems destined to meet a similarly ignominious end.
He fits in well with his colleagues, though, who are a motley crew of misfits. Despite the fact that they’ve been forced to sign an affidavit that they’ll comport themselves on the job or face the death penalty, they mostly seem to want to liberate themselves from boredom. There’s the stationmaster, who breeds pigeons and is regularly seen covered in their shit. His frequent decrying of the country’s lack of morals is directed largely at dispatcher Hubička, who is a relentless seducer of women, often using the station’s back room for his trysts. Miloš, too, has a budding romance with conductor Máša; much of the film’s plot concerns itself with his quest to rid himself of his virginity, which is hampered by his shame over his inability to perform sexually. “You’re just overly sensitive,” a young doctor assures Miloš after he attempts suicide.
Author Milan Kundera called the source novel “an incredible union of earthly humor and baroque imagination,” and Menzel’s direction shares a similar exuberance. Visual genitalia puns abound, from a cigarette tip cut with comically large scissors to the stationmaster caressing a rip in a sofa. At one point Miloš confesses his premature ejaculation issues while the stationmaster’s wife diligently strokes a dead goose’s neck. And of course there are the trains with their belching steam and clockwork timing that requires careful observation, and pulling the right levers. Menzel’s camera lingers on the delights of the flesh, too, particularly during a sequence that acquires a potent erotic charge as Hubička seduces the office telegraphist by imprinting rubber stamps to her bare skin.
All these antics are building to a tragic end, albeit one with the requisite big bang. Eventually Hubička enlists Miloš in an act of resistance: they’ll drop a bomb on a passing train carrying ammunition to the SS. Things don’t go entirely according to plan, and Menzel saves his bleakest punchline for last. “Do you know what the Czechs are? Laughing animals,” Nazi collaborator Zedníček proclaims – a declaration senior official Reinhard Heydrich once actually made – moments before the blast. Flattened against the building by the blowback, Hubička proves him right, cackling to the sky as black smoke fills the frame. That impish spirit, Menzel suggests, is its own form of defiance, and perhaps the only one that can truly endure.
Menzel was only twenty-eight years old when he made Closely Watched Trains, but his youth belies the gravity of his intent. Miloš’s impotence stands in for the perils of an entire country’s passivity, and while his fate is a cosmic joke, it’s also a warning. Born in 1938, Menzel’s life at that point was bookended by invasions. But as Peter Hames points out in his book-length study of the Czech New Wave, it would be wrong to interpret the film as a mere metaphor for what was happening in the country at the time. Instead it might be better read as a mournful reflection on history’s eternal return, where the same conditions keep producing the same results.
Unlike many of his fellow artists, Menzel remained in the Czech Republic despite several of his subsequent films being banned by the Communist regime. Whether this was out of stubbornness or necessity is hard to say. None of his work would reach quite the level of international success as Closely Watched Trains, but he would remain a humanistic and sly screen presence to the end, unafraid to be the finger in the eye of his oppressors. Such provocation feels galvanizing in our politically fraught times, and yet Menzel himself would say they’re hardly unique. This machine might kill fascists, but there’s no guarantee they’ll stay dead.
“Closely Watched Trains” is streaming on the Criterion Channel.
