Ostře sledované vlaky
Jiří Menzel (1966)
Closely Observed Trains[1] was the first full-length film directed by Jiří Menzel, made when he was only twenty-eight years old. Menzel is still active in film-making but, nearly half a century later, his debut feature remains his most famous work. It’s the absurdist coming-of-age story of Miloš, a young man working at a railway station in German-occupied Czechoslovakia during World War II. Closely Observed Trains won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in the spring – the Prague Spring – of 1968. Within a few months, the Soviet Union had invaded Czechoslovakia and Menzel’s film had acquired a new political dimension.
Closely Observed Trains begins with Miloš (Václav Neckář) donning the uniform for his new job as trainee station guard and telling us, with some pride, about his workshy and/or eccentric male ancestors, in whose footsteps he hopes to follow. The other main characters in the story are the stationmaster (Vladimir Valenta), who breeds pigeons and has a supportive wife (Libuše Havelková) but envies the sexual success, with a larger range of women, of his colleague, the train dispatcher Hubička (Josef Somr). Miloš – who is keen on the lovely young train conductress Máša (Jitka Bendová) but is still a virgin – is also anxious to begin to emulate Hubička. The station is not a busy one. The prevailing inactivity is interrupted by occasional visits from Zednicek (Vlastimil Brodský), a local politician and a collaborator with the Germans. His enthusiastic Nazi propaganda falls on deaf ears among the station staff. In the circumstances of these lives, sex is a matter of life and death and, in Menzel’s treatment, the substance of tragicomedy. During a night shift, Hubička flirts with the telegraphist Zdenička (Jitka Zelenohorská), imprinting the office’s rubber stamps on her thighs and backside. Zdenička’s outraged mother (Milada Jezková) complains and Hubička faces a disciplinary hearing. In the meantime, when Miloš and Máša eventually go to bed together, he ejaculates prematurely and is unable to perform thereafter. The next day, Miloš rents a room in a brothel for an hour. He tells the brothel madam that he doesn’t want a woman: once he’s locked the door of his room, he runs a bath, sits in it and slit his wrists. His life is saved but the link between sex and death has been made and it foreshadows the film’s dual climaxes.
After his suicide attempt, Miloš is treated by a doctor (a cameo from Menzel himself) who explains that ejaculatio praecox isn’t unusual in a young man and advises the patient to think of something else while he’s having sex (Miloš decides on football) but, before that happens, to seek the guidance of a sexually experienced woman. Miloš first approaches the stationmaster’s wife but he’s eventually helped out by the glamorous Resistance agent, code-name Viktoria Freie (Naďa Urbánková), who delivers an explosive device to Hubička, for use in blowing up a large German ammunition train scheduled to pass through the station the following day. In an unusual display of sexual self-denial, Hubička asks Viktoria to help Miloš lose his virginity; once he’s succeeded in doing so, Miloš is a new, self-confident man. Next morning, the approach of the ammunition train coincides with Hubička’s disciplinary hearing, conducted by Zednicek: with Hubička otherwise engaged, Miloš also takes on his senior colleague’s expected role in detonating the bomb. Miloš climbs up a semaphore gantry from where he drops the device onto the train. As he does so, he’s spotted by a machine-gunner on the train, who shoots him. Miloš’s body falls from the gantry, landing on the roof of the train shortly before it explodes[2].
With its parade of oddballs and in spite of the Nazi occupation setting, the film seems in its early stages a little mild: hardly anything happens until something bad happens. Closely Observed Trains takes on a different and more urgent focus once Miloš goes to the brothel. From this point onwards, the distinctive tragicomic tone is admirably sustained and Jiří Menzel’s screenplay, adapted from a 1965 novel by Bohumil Hrabal, is beautifully constructed. The aftermath to Hubička’s professional misconduct is a richly amusing subplot: Zdenička’s scandalised mother presents the incriminating evidence stamped on her daughter’s flesh to a succession of male officials who are willing to examine the evidence; at the final hearing, Zednicek concludes that Hubička’s actions did not amount to ‘an infringement of personal freedom’ but that using the stamps as he did was ‘an abuse of the German language’.
As Miloš, Václav Neckář has a perfect blend of dim-witted innocence and droll ardency. In an excellent supporting cast, Josef Somr is outstanding as Hubička. The appropriate and effective music is by Jiří Šust. It’s striking that, while the female characters are mostly relaxed and self-confident, Hubička is the only man in the story who could be described in similar terms. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film summarises the argument of Closely Observed Trains as ‘one may die if one acts, but if one does not act there can never be true joy’ – the examples of both Hubička and Miloš suggest that the best way to act is by having sex. Several elements of Menzel’s material also bring to mind his country’s most famous work of military-political satire, Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk, but this fine film is remarkably individual.
2 September 2015
[1] The film was released in the US as Closely Watched Trains.
[2] I saw Closely Observed Trains at the Edinburgh Filmhouse, where the screening was introduced by Dr David Sorfa, an academic in film studies at the University of Edinburgh. In his introduction, Sorfa mentioned that Menzel had also shot another ending to the film but, in order to avoid accusations of being a spoiler-sport, didn’t go into the details. The Wikipedia article on the film includes a reference to ‘an alternative version of the ending, not usually shown’. In this, ‘Miloš is not shot and does not fall onto the train, but he is killed anyway when, unforeseeably, the train, having received the time bomb that Miloš has dropped onto it, proceeds forward and away from Miloš and the gantry for some distance but then unaccountably stops and backs up underneath the gantry, when it then explodes, destroying the gantry and killing Miloš’. This text is shown, however, with a ‘citation needed’ caveat. According to the Routledge Encyclopedia of Film, an alternative ending has the protagonist ‘improbably [survive] the detonation’: Miloš ‘is seen hanging in the branches of a tree’.
