The Prague Post Online: Opinion: Two Czech kings

August 30th, 2008

Endowment Fund Business Listings ONLINE Reservations Classifieds Subscriptions

Two Czech kings

Disappointment surrounds the comebacks of two great filmmakers
Commentary | Search restaurants | Archives

May 2nd, 2007 issue

enlarge

This week, the awarding of the Golden Kingfisher at the Pilsen Finale festival celebrates the best of the past year’s Czech feature films and documentaries. To coincide with this event, The Prague Post is reprinting a critique from the current edition of the Czech and English current affairs journal The New Presence, part of an ongoing cooperation with this nonprofit publication.

By Dominík Jun

This winter marked the return to the big screen of two of the most respected Czech filmmakers: Jiří Menzel and Miloš Forman. This was made all the more exciting by the fact that neither filmmaker had directed a feature film in a good number of years. Forman’s last film was the 1999 biography of U.S. comedian Andy Kaufman, Man on the Moon. Menzel’s last feature-length film was the 1994 film Život a neobyčejná dobrodružství vojáka Ivana Čonkina (The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin) and told the story of a Czech soldier serving in Ukraine during World War II.

However, both directors’ most recent films — Forman’s Goya’s Ghosts and in particular Menzel’s I Served the King of England — have met with mixed, even strongly negative, critical reactions.

Forman and Menzel are perhaps best known as pioneers of the Czech New Wave, which brought Czech cinema to international attention during the 1960s. Perhaps Menzel’s most famous film is the Oscar-winning Closely Watched Trains (1966), about a young and bumbling railway apprentice who embarks on a journey of sexual awakening and self-discovery in a small Czech village train station. Menzel’s 1968 film Rozmarné léto (Capricious Summer) — a poetic fairy tale about life, love and a very long summer — was also widely acclaimed at the time of its release.

Unlike Forman, who went into exile following the Soviet invasion of 1968, Menzel remained in Czechoslovakia. Despite the inherent difficulties of working in the normalization era, he nonetheless managed to make several critically acclaimed films such as Na samotě u lesa (Alone in the Forest, 1976), Postřižiny (Cutting It Short, 1981) and, in 1985, the Oscar-nominated film Vesnicko má Stredisková (My Sweet Little Village). Since the fall of communism, Menzel has increasingly focused on his acting career, performing in films across Europe.

Before going into exile, Forman had already made a name for himself across the world as a promising young director — at home he was becoming increasingly persona non grata. Hoří má panenko (The Firemen’s Ball, 1965) was an unmistakable parody of the functioning of communist Czechoslovakia. It was to be the last Czech film he would ever make. As Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968, Forman happened to be in Paris. The director soon decided that he could not return home and ultimately moved to the United States.

Both Forman and Menzel have moved toward a more conventional style of filmmaking over the years. Normalization-era Czechoslovakia appeared to motivate Menzel to at least try to make the kind of films he wanted to make. Forman had the pressures of the Hollywood machine to contend with, but undoubtedly succeeded in retaining his creative vision, despite his first U.S. film, Taking Off (1971), being a box-office flop. But, whereas Forman was gaining a reputation as a world-class director (his 1976 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest garnered an impressive five Oscars; Amadeus, from 1984, won an even more impressive eight), Menzel depended on a loyal domestic following.

The new millennium found both directors in a similar bind. In the case of Forman, the 1999 film Man on the Moon was greeted with mixed critical reactions and meager box-office takings; his previous film, The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) had met with the same fate. The golden boy of the 1970s and ’80s had, in the eyes of many, become little more than a director of biopics. Man on the Moon was the last film Forman would make for five long years. Menzel arguably found himself in a deeper creative crisis, seemingly abandoning his roots as a dramatic film director in favor of acting projects as well as directing for television and theater.

Worst of all worlds

Since 1994, Menzel had been attempting to film the Bohumil Hrabal novel I Served the King of England (Hrabal had also written Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains). After many years of apparent legal and creative squabbling, Menzel finally managed to secure a relatively huge budget for a Czech film (84 million Kč, or $4.1 million). The controversial populist Czech television station TV Nova was to be the main backer. The dramatic story of the film’s production, as well as the fame of the director, would certainly guarantee interest from many Czech quarters.

A massive advertising campaign by TV Nova promised to secure the ever-crucial “bums in seats.” The fact that I Served the King of England would be the first Czech film to compete at the Berlinale festival for almost 17 years was yet another seeming jewel in the crown for the film’s prospects. Ironically, back in 1990, it was Menzel’s film (banned by the communists since it was filmed in 1969) Skřivánci na niti (Larks on a String) that won the Golden Bear award.

Box-office receipts and participation at the prestigious Berlin festival would surely be enough to silence many of Menzel’s critics. However, upon the film’s release, the majority of Czech critics agreed that, while it was certainly Menzel’s most expensive film, it was not his best by a long shot. I Served the King of England ultimately fails on many levels. Technically, the fact that Bulgarian actor Ivan Barnev’s voice has been dubbed over by the Czech actor Oldřich Kaiser proves to be both distracting and unsatisfying.

Primarily, it appears Menzel didn’t really know what kind of film he wanted to make. Was the film supposed to be an opulent visual experiment or a lavish historical drama? He has since told the media that the producers insisted that he film the entire book. Naturally, that was an impossible task, despite the fact that Menzel at least attempted to stick to the book as closely as possible, albeit somewhat mechanically.

The end result is a mere illustration from which a viewer not familiar with the book will ultimately leave confused and dissatisfied. Conversely, those who have read the book can protest against the “televisual” style of filming the director ultimately chose. Despite its flaws, however, it appears TV Nova’s advertising campaign at least ensured that the film did relatively well at the box office. It came (sadly) as no surprise that it also recently won the Czech Lion award, this country’s Oscar equivalent.

Melodrama
Forman’s Goya’s Ghosts suffers from similar problems. The film focuses on the 18th-century Spanish painter Francisco Goya and his muse, Ines, who is accused of being a heretic by the forces leading the Spanish Inquisition. Though it does have its fans, to many, the film is at best “average” — a somewhat disjointed retelling of Forman’s far better Amadeus. The main fault could be said to lie with the script, never mind the historical facts upon which the film is based or the somewhat poorly conceived coincidences and dramatic lurches that drive the plot.

The main issue is simply that the script does not allow Forman to tell the kind of story that would make for a great film. The performances of Javier Bardem, Natalie Portman (in particular) and Stellan Skarsgard are certainly excellent, but, unusually for Forman, the film remains little more than a melodrama. Czech cinema is clearly in crisis, and new directors are increasingly failing to make their mark on the world stage. Meanwhile, the “greats” of yesteryear may never return to former glories.

The author is the editor of The New Presence and a longtime Prague resident and journalist.

Be the first to add a comment!

Most e-mailed articles
Green light for green cards New gambling laws could raise the stakes for poker A tale of two tunnels

Related articles
Prague police: Who's protected and served? Shhh: Mr. Topolánek has a little problem ... Letters to the Editor Child's Play

Most visited in Business Listings

The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in
The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic.
To subscribe to the print paper, click here.
Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.