Transgression at the end of its line: On Czech director Jiri Menzel's 1966 Oscar-winning film "Closely Watched Trains"

Two questions assail most obviously the attentive viewer of Jiri Menzel’s “Closely Watched Trains.”  First, what is the relationship between the film’s view of the time in which the events are set (1943) and the present time of the film’s making (1966)?  Secondly, what is the relationship between, on the one hand, the sexual libertinism that is the focus of much of the attention of the film and its characters, and, on the other, the possibilities of political resistance versus the everyday life and problems of the films’ various characters?

Let’s start with what is most obvious.  The film is set in the train station of a Czech town, during the closing years of the German occupation during the war.  The film’s major characters are Czechs, some of whom are Nazi collaborators, some involved in the resistance, and others just living their lives and doing their jobs. The first scene introduces us to Milos (Vaclav Neckar), a young man whose mother gives him a lecture about the importance of his role in his new job at the station, which we know he doesn’t take very seriously, though he winds up seriously worrying about his virility, especially after he meets a nice young Czech girl who is a train conductor and with whom he has a pending rendez-vous about which he is anxious. His immediate superior, Hubicka, is a man who seems to place sexual escapades above his job duties, though it turns out he is involved with the resistance, in a task for which he induces Milos’s help, which is to blow up a train filled with Nazi soldiers.  

We get a picture of everyday life and the tasks of work as things most people do without taking too seriously, while sex is on the mind instead of several people, including Milos, whose desire is to know that he is capable of doing what he thinks important.  

There are two sides to the goings-on in the train station.  One belongs to the Nazi state and its local collaborators, and the other to the more or less ordinary people whose lives are both ultimately hemmed in by that and normally involving all the dull boredom and insignificance of provincial life. The stationmaster is upset that his sofa, which gets used for sex, winds up being torn with scratches — which, we see, emit fibers in a triangular shape that looks a bit like a woman’s pubic hair.  The big local boss, played by the great Czech New Wave actor Vlastimil Brodsky, is concerned with the grave importance of the Nazi cause in the war.  He explains this by comically giving a positive spin to all of the areas of Nazi retreat in 1943, following the allied invasion of Sicily and during the winter of the decisive Battle of Stalingrad: each retreat is explained as a brilliant tactical move.  It turns out the scandalous event that his government locally is most concerned with is one of the disrespectful and disorderly conduct or lèse majesté of the senior station attendant, Milos’s mentor Hubicka, having used official stamps on the backside and rear thighs of the girl he bedded on the sofa.  It is at precisely the moment that the couple involved in this silly symbolic transgression are being interrogated, she with quite a seemingly innocent personal pride and glee, that Milos realizes that it falls to him to place the bomb he was earlier shown onto the soldier-laden Nazi train about to pass that has been designated for the blow-up.  The young man had earlier been so worried about losing his virginity in the right way that out of seeming failure to do so he had slit his wrists in the bathroom of the hotel room he had rented on pretense of siting a tryst.  Now it’s time for him to actually do something that will make a difference.  He has secured a date for the following day with the young conductress (from a different train); she seems an uncomplicated nice girl who is genuinely interested in him.  

And so Milos goes to place the bomb from a signal tower. He drops it onto the moving train, but, anxious still about the success of his endeavors, wondering if the bomb has fallen in the right place and will go off, he is looking down to see when he is fatally spied by a soldier in the passing train, and, being shot, falls onto the train some cars behind where the bomb fell.  Soon we see an explosion in the distance, smoke from which will gradually fill the air and the screen, when we see the title declaring “the End.”  

The occupying state authorities, who in the film are wartime Germans, with their collaborators, are obsessed with their own importance, to the point that they can interpret failures as successes given the will involved, and also take a bit too seriously the need to prevent or punish symbolic transgressions.  One of which is a sex act that to them is only significant as an insult to the ruling power.  

The importance of the idea of trains passing through a provincial train depot in relation to the Nazi occupation state must have not been lost on many Czech or foreign viewers, as, even without any direct reference in the film to the use of trains, elsewhere at least, to transport people to death camps, the suggestion of that is all too obvious.  However, the focus of the concerns of all the people in the film largely turns on far more trivial concerns, which also means that this idea, and the question, of importance and the lack thereof that, in the tradition of Czech literature that owes so much, as Hrabal’s does, to Kafka, makes for such comedy, is being quite centrally posed.    

For dissident films made under Communism always, when they were ostensibly concerned with the past, had more than one historical referent, and images of the contemporary regime were never far from the mind of an astute director or viewer.   And what is only a little bit less obvious, than unremarked details of the Nazi occupation period, but clear enough to an attentive viewer, is that of an occupation government authority that poses for local citizens the possibilities of compliance or resistance in a setting of provincial boredom — especially given the triviality of those concerns of the authorities that appear to occupy the most, which is to say an outsized, attention — all this easily enough transfers to the then current situation of a Czechoslovakia under Soviet occupation in the 60s.

At first, Milos’s concerns are little different from those of the occupation authorities, as is also the case with the immediate boss Hubicka who is, in an ambiguous moral tenor, something of a role model for the young man.  What you are allowed to worry about in such situations is the affairs and details of your private life.  It is there that we can expect to see images of transgression, part of the object of which must be to take seriously in a different way some of the things such oppressive governments will worry about in order perhaps to both generalize, semi-absolutizing, their authority, and render it blatantly arbitrary.  That the film was made in the time of both artistic experimentation and hints of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia, and the broad “sexual revolution” of the ‘60s generally, must cause us to both be unsurprised that the latter would be evoked and a bit curious at its misuses.  The government would surely have liked for every attempt at rebellious transgression to be politically insignificant, and merely a matter of a young man’s pride or shame in his own demonstrably performed potency and its presumed importance.  And leave it at that.  And the film almost does.  But then, at the very moment when his superior is being interrogated about the misuse of government stamps, a purely comic transgression worthy of the novelist on whose story the film is based, and the post-Kafka tradition of Czech humor generally, — at this very moment, the young Milos proves himself with a potency of a different kind.  And soon there is the explosion, the collaborator authorities look worried while the Hubicka dissident sympathizer supervisor laughs, followed by the screen filling with smoke.  As if it starts with trivial concerns, driven as much as anything by the very Kafkaean problem of boredom in everyday working life, and then ends in a big explosion that symbolically realizes the greatest hope, that comedy can point to, which is that everything in this little world be destroyed.  The orgy of this is superficially erotic and profoundly political. 

The film treats the contemporary sexual revolution as something of a distraction, a displacement.  The film’s major characters, with the exception of the conductress girl, who just seems like an unproblematically nice young person, with a radiant smile, and a genuine interest in Milos and meeting up with him soon, are absorbed in being for or against the predictable essentially erotic transgressions of the normalcy of everyday life.  And yet all of that is really a distraction.  It is what the rulers of the societies of the time, in the West and the Central European East, were prepared to understand and deal with.  (In America, as I have argued elsewhere, opposition to the Vietnam War was transformed, with the Watergate affair, in the person of President Nixon, into a psychological criticism of a corrupt individual; in this way, the political was made personal, even while feminism claimed to do something similar (ostensibly opposite: to make the personal political) for very different purposes.) But among transgressions, some only seem consequential while some others truly are. In the space of the film, the blow-up suggestively seems to annihilate a whole world of false transgressions and provincial boredom that are covered over by a government apparatus whose leaders seem caught up in their own vanities.  The film is not just celebrating the resistance of some local wartime partisans; what is blown up at the end is by implication something larger.  In direct concreteness, there was surely no way to say what that was, in Czechoslovakia in 1966, as comparable things cannot be said in a directly consequential way perhaps in any place and at any time.  This is one way in which art can be important; apart from it, in official discourses, criticism of real social problems can easily wind up succeeding in some way that is profoundly displaced, onto something essentially apolitical, because not the real matter at all. This film finds its place partly in a series of very political films made in Europe in the period of roughly 1965-75 that were ostensibly about the contemporary sexual liberation and its comic features, but actually both critical of that and focused even more on something else.  Recognizing this gives the film a punch that can still be felt.   

In the subsequent Larks on a String, also based on Hrabal and filmed by Menzel in 1969 under the Soviet occupation and immediately banned, only to be released in 1990 following the fall of the regime, the young man played by the same charismatic actor, Vaclav Neckar, loves a very nice young woman who is a fellow political prisoner working in a junkyard.  He likes to shine a light onto her face with a little mirror he keeps.  The two of them are full of hope, even as their marriage is performed with one of them, imprisoned, absent, and they are figures of an optimism that endures even when they are kept separate as both are prosecuted and given further sentences.  After repeatedly using stirring music that plainly evokes, every time the two (almost) get together, romantic fantasies a European film viewer will likely associate with Hollywood, the film ends with the unnamed Neckar character, imprisoned for being an “Adventist” who refused to work on Saturdays (an obvious jab at the regime’s antisemitic potentialities), descending into a mine after announcing that in marrying the girl he married “truth.”  The ambiguity of this—if they love each other because they are both heroes and willing martyrs to their cause, which gets priority, the personal or the political?—is no doubt insufficiently recognized. This in this film that, more than a decade after Polish director Andzrej Wajda’s would-be hero winds up dying in a trash heap, actually takes place almost entirely in a junkyard amid junk. Sometimes social problems have plausible individual responses that are not, however, (as Marxists would disdain), “individual solutions.” History is not completed and finished in the ideal state, but continues to happen, sometimes as farce, but without ceasing to be tragic. What, in this context, we will want to do or see happen is no less so.