That Total Film 1964 - 1966 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 16

The sixteenth chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films.
(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)

View "Chapter 16: That Total Film"

That Total Film

The films in today's chapter form an entity thrilling, melancholy, beautiful, and tragic - the end of a beginning and the beginning of an end. When asked to write about Fists in the Pocket forty years later, Jean-Pierre Gorin noted ruefully, "every scene ... with the convulsive beauty of its framing and composition, amply proves how much this period was made by people so steeped in classical culture that they fantasized it could be solid beyond its fragility, shaking it to the core and ultimately ushering in a world they could themselves hardly live in." Oh, you can see that all over the place today, in a chapter that - not accidentally - finds itself exactly halfway through the series, to the point where the closing clip is even divided in two, to be concluded tomorrow.

The Sunday Matinee: Loves of a Blonde

This is an entry in The Sunday Matinee series.

Loves of a Blonde, Czechoslovakia,1965, dir. Milos Forman, starring Hana Brejchová, Vladimír Pucholt

Story: A young woman sleeps with a charming young pianist; when she pursues him to Prague, she discovers that he did not take their romance as seriously as she did.

The title, like so much else in Milos Forman’s second feature, is gently ironic. With its plural “Loves,” it suggests a worldly figure, a free-spirited sixties girl who rounds up loves, and lovers, with a sense of carefree fun. At the same time, “a Blonde” implies a symbolic woman more than an actual one, probably a silly girl who falls in love and breaks hearts without knowing her own power and/or foolishness. Well, the blonde in Loves of a Blonde, Andula (Hana Brejchová), is rather foolish. And in the course of the movie, she does upset and befuddle at least one boyfriend, by recoiling from him without telling him why. Yet at film’s end, she has had only one real lover, and it was her heart that was broken, not his. Most importantly, Andula is not Julie Christie sent to Prague – not a swinger, but a dreamer, a naïve young woman who is not responding to a new freedom but reacting to a lack thereof. Just as the Prague Spring would flourish for a brief period, before Soviet tanks re-imposed a totalitarian regime for another two decades, so Andula’s season of hope is short. When we last see her, she is back in the factory toiling away, sad and quite alone. Though Loves of a Blonde is a comedy, and a very funny one, at its core is a tragic (albeit still romantic) sense of life.