BLONDE IN LOVE / Lásky jedné plavovlásky (1965)

Thursday | 27th April 2006 | 20:00 | Ceremonial Opening at 19:30!

Czechoslovakia / 1965 / 75 minutes / director: Miloš Forman / screenplay: Miloš Forman, Jaroslav Papoušek, Ivan Passer / cinematography: Miroslav Ondříček / music: Josef Illín / editing: Miroslav Hájek / cast: Hana Brejchová (Andula), Vladimír Pucholt (Milda), Vladimír Menšík (Vacovský), Milada Ježková (Mildova matka), Josef Šebánek (Mildův otec) /

The first Milos Forman Czechoslovak films draw much of their humor and thematic significance from the conflict of generations. Unlike his older colleagues and his new wave French contemporaries Forman is not a politically committed artist, his youths are not enraged radicals, but clumsy and timid girls and boys trapped in a world of awkward gentlemen´s agreements. They enter this world with their first job and feel its creeping amorality with all their innocence. The whole generation of fathers reveal as good-natured, but hollow.

Such revelations form the background of small dramas of understatement, poetry and unswerwing criticism of the common Czech lifestyle and view of life in 1960s. In Loves of a Blonde, as in his feature debut Black Peter (1963) Forman still favours the young, though the characters he chooses are victims rather than active people. In Firemen´s Ball (1968) his criticism - and cynism as some claim - falls indiscriminately upon the whole society. The atmosphere changes from humorous to icy in his last Czechoslovak work.

Forman is a master of Czech cinema, famous for his concern with common people, represented by a series of non-actors he found, his underlying critical vigor, exact and satirical, his humor, his civilian, cinéma vérité approach and excellent staging of absurd and empty speeches. He remains one of the most influential Czech directors of all time, telling more about Czechs than they would possibly like to say themselves.

Veronika Klusáková