MOVIE REVIEW : A Memento of Prague Spring

Jiri Menzel’s 1969 “Larks on a String” (at the Monica 4-Plex), banned for 20 years, is one of the most poignant mementos of the Prague Spring, that brief flowering of the arts in Czechoslovakia in the late ‘60s that was so swiftly trampled by Soviet tanks.

Time, happily, has only made the film seem better, underlining Menzel’s formidable gifts as a filmmaker: his lyricism, subtlety, compassion, humor and courage. “Larks on a String,” which took the top prize at Berlin last year, ranks with Menzel’s best work, including his Oscar-winning 1966 “Closely Watched Trains.”

The star of that film is the principal figure in “Larks on a String,” which is set in the Stalinist early ‘50s. Wistful Vaclav Neckar, who so strongly resembles Menzel physically he could be his brother, is among a group of men who have been branded bourgeois dissidents and ordered to perform “voluntary” labor compacting scrap metal at a junkyard in the town of Kladno. His sin is that he refused to work--he’s a cook--on the Sabbath. Pretty Jitka Zelenohorksa plays one of a group of women prisoners also working at the yard. They are serving time for trying to leave the country.

This time and place hardly sounds like the setting for laughter and joy, yet Menzel, in drawing from a collection of short stories by Bohumil Hrabal, discovers both at every turn while he’s zestfully satirizing the heavy-handed cant of the doctrinaire Communist Party line.

Characteristically, Menzel finds evil in the system rather than the people caught up in it. Among Neckar’s co-workers are a barber who was declared guilty of the sin of employing twice as many men in his shop than necessary, an academic who refused to destroy landmarks of Western literature, and a saxophonist whose musical instrument had been declared decadent.

Buoyed by warm camaraderie, these men, appreciating the absurdity of their fate, are admirably good-natured, and the women in turn enjoy flirting with them. Even the government agent (bulky Rudolf Hrusinsky, who was to become a Menzel regular) in charge of the men, and the guard (Jaroslav Satoransky), who is about to be married, are warm, decent types.

Menzel so disarms us with the sly, ribald fun he has in observing the ways in which these men and women circumvent the rules against fraternization and in poking at the stupidity, pettiness and hypocrisy of the hard-line party dictates that we’re lulled into thinking that life for this resilient group of people isn’t so bad, that the average Czech doesn’t have it much better, and that things will get better for everyone.

From out of left field Menzel then reminds us just how severe the penalty for free expression can be. And in making this wry and lovely film (Times-rated Mature for adult themes and situations) Menzel was severely punished himself. His irreverent satire not only was banned for the next two decades in the wake of the Soviet invasion, but he was also unable to make another film until 1974 and only regained a reasonable measure of his own freedom of expression with his 1985 Oscar-nominated “My Sweet Little Village.”

‘Larks on a String’

Vaclav Neckar: Pavel Hvezdar

Jitka Zelenohorksa: Jitka

Rudolf Hrusinsky: The Government Agent

Jaroslav Satoransky: Andel, the Guard

An IFEX release of a Barrandov Film Studios production. Director Jiri Menzel. Screenplay by Menzel and Bohumil Hrabal; based on Hrabal’s collection of short stories, “Advertisement for a House I Don’t Want to Live in Anymore.” Cinematographer Jaromir Sofr. Editor Jirina Lukesova. Music Jiri Sust. Art director Oldrich Bosak. Sound Jiri Pavlik. In Czech, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.

Times-rated Mature (adult themes and situations).