I spent one winter systematically going through each & every film in the London Czech Centre's Video library, & of all the films, I returned to this one time & again. It's a fantastic & bizarre film, where the state of despair that existed under communism is encoded in a strange blending of the past , the present & film
noir.
There is the feeling that an ad-hoc attempt to get past the censors unwittingly produces an utterly Czechoslovakian perspective.To those familiar with Eastern Europe pre 1989, the sense of time having become stuck & disorientated & playing games with your perception is part of
the magic of this film.
My fondness for this film is rooted in a nostalgia or need to remember
communist Europe. I first visited Prague in the mid 1980's & i was so struck that the Prague of this film replicated almost identically the Prague i found & came to know 20 years later, in the last years of Communism. My nights at the Cafe
Slavia were exactly as the Jazz club scenes depicted in the film, with the same dramas & the same characters. Also the sense of mistrust , betrayal & of being watched & listened to & the perverse relation to Psychiatry. I thought this connection was very profound, & it made me think this film was, in some way, important . Both the film & my experiences in Prague sat either side of the Brief thaw of the late sixties. They bypassed that optimistic period & looked directly at each other; the one reflecting a National trauma of the war & Communist conversion & the other reflecting the trauma of 2 decades of
stagnation. Often when people think of Czech New Wave, they think in terms of 60's youth & Prague spring. But this film brought home to me how brief that
period really was & it's focus is the context from which that period rose &
returned to; a shockingly, relentless, hyper-unreal, oppressive isolation which was the former state of Czechoslovakia. Go see, fantastic -
