An alternately rich and not-so-rich behavioral comedy largely set in a rural Czech railway station during the Nazi occupation, Jirí Menzel’s Ostre sledované vlaky, from Bohumil Hrabel and Menzel’s script, tracks young trainee Milǒs Hrma as he surveys the sexual shenanigans of his elders and achingly longs to lose his virginity. Twice, one thing or another interrupts the consummation even of a kiss with his girlfriend (in one instance, accounting for one of the most irresistible and iconic shots of the sixties); but, in any case, he will have to lose his virginity elsewhere, because Masa, a train conductor, is “a nice girl.” Meanwhile, family history or legend—take your pick—has given the boy big shoes to fill when it comes to the cause of Czech nationalism.
When a Nazi officer leaves the station house, instead of moving forward his car moves backwards—this is not a car in reverse, but a shot in reverse motion: one of several lovely touches. It is an historic retreat—and a reminder that Milǒs’s grandfather, a hypnotist, had tried to hypnotize the driver of the first invading German tank and cause him and his cohorts to retreat. The effort failed; Granddad was (literally) crushed.
The opening is absolutely wonderful. The camera, in closeup, upwardly takes in the row of buttons on Milǒs’s uniform, suggesting it is a military uniform. Another closeup shows his mother’s hands transporting the cap to his head: a mock coronation, but not to Milǒs’s mother. The momentousness of her son’s first job—his retired father also was a railway worker—justifies the visual grandiloquence!
The title refers to trains shipping German munitions. Milǒs succeeds in blowing one up. His family may have its first real hero—but, alas, not the boy himself.
Dennis Grunes 