Jiří Menzel, who made films from the 1960s through to the 2010s, has passed away at the age of 82 according to reports. He was an actor with 80 credits (most recently a 2018 feature called The Interpreter) and a theater director, but he will best be remembered as one of the principle film directors, along with Miloš Forman and Věra Chytilová, of the Czech New Wave.
His first feature, 1966’s Closely Watched Trains, became one of the most beloved mid-century “foreign films” to the art house set. (It is spine number 131 out of 1058 in the Criterion Collection.) The anti-war comedy-drama won the Oscar for best foreign language film at the 1968 ceremony; Forman’s Loves of a Blonde was nominated in the same category the year before.
Set during World War II, Closely Watched Trains concerns a sexually eager young railway worker whose interest toggles between resisting fascism and lusting for women. It is a funny, honest, and ultimately beautifully shot film, and probably the only movie to mix the mundane tools of bureaucracy with intimacy and passion.
He followed with two additional comedies, Capricious Summer and Crime in a Music Hall, but his 1969 film Larks on a String was suppressed by the more hardline Communist government after the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968. The movie, in which “bourgeois elements” (a professor, a saxophonist, and a milkman) are sent to work in a junkyard for “re-education” was not released until the after Velvet Revolution, in 1990. It then won the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear prize.
His 1985 film My Sweet Little Village, about the comings-and-goings in a small community forever locking horns with bureaucracy, was nominated for a best foreign Oscar. It lost to The Netherlands’s The Assault, but was in good company with France’s Betty Blue and Canada’s The Decline of the American Empire.
Menzel’s last movie to make a mark internationally was I Served The King of England from 2006. As with Closely Watched Trains it concerns a somewhat bewildered individual whose desires get caught up in world events, mixing comedy and heartbreak.
In an obituary printed in The Guardian, critic Peter Bradshaw called Menzel’s work “defiant gestures of liberation” that “countered the morose and insidious puritanism of state ideology with joy and fun.”
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