Closely Observed Trains
Criterion Collection Director: Jirà Menzel, 1966, 92 mins
When interviewed Jirà Menzel, aided by a translator, he kicked me hard under the table three times for asking what I thought were pertinent questions.
Afterwards he told me that the translator was the Czech equivalent of the KGB. The director, unlike Milos Forman, never left his country after the brutal Soviet invasion of 1968 and was unable to make films for some time. Closely Observed Trains had been one of the pinnacles of Czech New Wave.
Menzel, at his best a superb miniaturist, made a good job of Bohumil Hrabal's short story. The film-maker had to translate Hrabal's multi-layered monologues into visual form, and he succeeded magically.
Shot in and around the Bohemian train station of Lodenice and set near the end of the Second World War, the story follows a shy young clerk with a putative love life that he can't manage.
The quirky erotic episodes include him enviously watching as a station guard rubber-stamps the bare bottom of a flirtatious peasant girl he has contrived to spread across his lap.
In another scene, a visiting Nazi controller explains to those at the station how, even in probable defeat, the Germans are triumphant; and the clerk's first sight of dead people on a passing train reminds one of the deadly war raging outside this microcosm.
Observant, charming, funny and moving at the same time - humanist cinema at its best.
