THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Czech filmmaker Jiri Menzel came across as a carefree old man, always with a faint smile lurking at the corner of his lips as though he was secretly amused by all the fuss around. Menzel just could not take anything, even himself, seriously. This comic detachment, perhaps, is a unique behavioural accessory he had cultivated to adapt to the severity of Soviet domination, just the way a squirrel in the hottest regions of Africa grows a ridiculously long and bushy tail to hold over its head like an umbrella.
It is, therefore, not a surprise that Menzel made his best films – ‘Closely Watched Trains’, ‘Larks on a String’, ‘Cutting it Short’ - when Czechoslovakia was trapped within the Iron Curtain. “We were not strong enough to make war. But we had one potent weapon; we could laugh at our enemy,” Menzel said at the In Conversation organised as part of IFFK here on Saturday “This is a Czech temperament, this love for humour,” Menzel said. It could be this innate ability to laugh in the face of danger that had allowed the Czechoslovakians to push out the Soviets from their land, without a drop of blood being shed, as part of a movement that is now famously called the ‘Velvet Revolution’. “Good comedy rings truer,” he felt. “A smile can lead one to discover more things about life than philosophy,” he added.
It is an irony, therefore, that most of Menzel’s films are adaptations of Bohumil Hrabal, considered the greatest Czech writer of the 20th century. “Hrabal was dense and philosophical,” Menzel conceded. But his reflex was almost the opposite. They were the yin and yang of Czech culture. Menzel gave a touch of lightness to Hrabal’s sturdy compositions, possibly deceiving thick-headed Soviet censors. Like a man prone to self doubts, Menzel seems to look down upon even this feat. “I did not have enough courage to do what I wanted to do. All the films that I did were not my projects, I was asked to do them by somebody else,” he said.
And when he became courageous, even by his own standards, history conspired to scuttle Menzel. During the Prague Spring in 1968, when Communist part of Czechoslovakia initiated reforms, he courageously pulled out a Hrabal story banned for quite long by the Communists and made ‘Larks on a String’. But by the time the film was completed, Soviet tanks re-entered Prague and put an abrupt end to a short-lived spring. ‘Larks on a String’, which had Menzel’s most incandescent humour, was banned. It saw the light of day more than two decades later, when it won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 1990. “Didn’t I tell you that only comedy survived,” he said, a sly wink at the corner of his eye.
