Voted by critics in the 1990s as one of the ten best films from the former Czechoslovakia, Slnko v sieti—alternately translated as The Sun in a Net or Sunshine Caught in a Net—derives from three short stories by Alfonz Bednár, which he himself adapted. Brilliantly directed by Štefan Uher (like Bednár, a Slovak), the film may be considered, depending on one’s point of view, as either an immediate antecedent of the Czech New Wave or, itself, the launch of the movement. Reflecting a loosening of the Communist grip on the country’s cultural and artistic expression, it departs from officially mandated “socialist realism,” both in its fluid, radical, associative style and its scathingly honest, unblinking social amd political content. Call it cinema’s first hurled hunk of spit of the gathering Czech New Wave.
The black-and-white film, consisting mostly of monotonous light grays, opens outdoors in a drab urban setting with abrasive sounds, including those of a screeching bird and demolishing equipment; cut from the same aural cloth, “Bullshit” is the first word we hear—spoken, aloud to himself, by student Oldrich “Fajolo” Fajták in response to what he hears said on the radio. Fajolo thus expresses his attitude towards the conformist, restrictive state in which he finds himself in the prime of his youth.
His utterance “Bullshit” also opposes state hypocrisy, which under penalty of official reprisals he must bend to, thereby becoming a hypocrite himself. Fajolo thus leaves his girlfriend Bela Blažejová to work in a summer “volunteer” farm camp; the tension achieved between the sheer, abundant beauty of the country and, essentially, the disdained forced labor accounts for striking passages. (One also takes in how poorly functioning the collectivized farm is—a strike at the heart of Soviet- and Soviet-satellite mythology.) During their separation, both Bela and Fajolo, moreover, couple with new partners.
This is a film ripe with surprising, inventive camera angles and dazzling imagery. Perhaps the centrifugal image—I confess: I wept—positions the camera to give the appearance that the sun itself has been caught in a fisherman’s wide net. The shattering effect, a commentary on the unnaturalness of repressive states, is cumulative; throughout the film there have been glimpses of people shot through “the net” and net-like structures. The entrapment of the sun is, of course, a metaphor for the entrapment of people; but more: it represents the light, enlightenment and freedom, obstructed by the state, from which human beings are being cut off.
Another theme pertains to the contagious nature of the lies of the state. Both a beclouded solar eclipse and a dropped water level, leaving behind only dry land, lead Bela and younger brother Milo to lie to their blind mother about these, presumably for the sake of the woman’s own delight and happiness.
Regrettably, the sure, tough poetry of this remarkable film is eventually defeated by an exposure of the material’s literary mechanics; but, until that relatively late point, how the film soars.
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NO LOVE FOR JOHNNIE (Ralph Thomas, 1961)
May 28, 2012In a phenomenal performance that brought him best actor prizes at Berlin and from the British Academy, Peter Finch plays 42-year-old Johnnie Byrne, a just-reëlected Labour Party member of Parliament the reason for whose exclusion from his prime minister’s Labour Government takes time in coming to light. When he is finally told, it seems as though the explanation should have been obvious from the start—one of the few head-scratchers in an otherwise absolutely brilliant script. Mordecai Richler and Nicholas Phipps adapted the 1958 novel by former MP Wilfred Fienburgh. There isn’t a political moment in this film that fails to either absorb the viewer’s interest or convince. One isn’t left to wonder why the New York Daily News named No Love for Johnnie one of 1961’s ten best films.
There are two dovetailing main strands to the narrative, one political, the other romantic. Byrne considers publicly opposing his prime minister regarding a rumored intention of foreign adventurism, on the grounds that the outcome might betray Labour principles; in this, the film’s most remarkable aspect, we “see” something of the mental process by which Byrne, who is ambitious in his career, convinces himself (and perhaps us) he is proceeding on the basis of principle. It is a nebulous and gray area in a black-and-white film which, keyed also to London weather, appropriately favors light gray tonalities.
Once his wife walks out on him, Byrne advances on a neighbor (played by a younger, more vulnerable Billie Whitelaw than we are used to seeing) and then a lovely model half his age, with whom he has a passionate affair and seems genuinely to fall in love. But each in turn is sacrificed to his career ambition, for the sake of which he plans on reconciling with his estranged wife—that is, until a blow of irony makes her, too, an impediment to his ambition. The title of the film is ironic; Byrne may bemoan that there’s “no love for Johnnie,” but it is Johnnie, himself, who ruins or chucks every opportunity for love in his life.
There is a sex scene between Byrne and Pauline West, the young model, that is wildly unconvincing owing to its satin-smooth body movements and camera movements which take into account none of the gap in the pair’s ages and contrasting levels of experience. One, especially today, cringes at the hokiness.
Ralph Thomas directed—the same Ralph Thomas responsible for those Doctor comedies in the fifties starring Dirk Bogarde.
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