‘The Firemen’s Ball‘ (the Czech title is ‘Horí, má panenko‘ – ‘Fire, my doll!’), the last film made in Czechoslovakia by Milos Forman in 1967, before the ‘spring of Prague’ and the exile that moved his career to the West, is in my opinion not only his best film and the best film of the talented and courageous Czechoslovak film schools of the 1960s, but also, allegedly, the best film made in the communist countries behind of the Iron Curtain. It is a symbolic film, a precious jewel that in only 70 minutes concentrates sarcasm and the absurd, social and political criticism on the edge of the permissible under the conditions of censorship, and the refusal of the film mekers to be reduced to silence.
Somewhere in the socialist Czechoslovakia, the firemen committee organizes a ball in honor of the 86th birthday of their former chief. Birthday 85th had been omitted, and in the meantime the veteran of the guild has been detected with cancer, though he doesn’t know it. The celebration is being prepared according to all the rules of this kind of activity, with a raffle from which the objects are stolen, first the ones of value and the consumables, then the smaller ones, finally everything disappears. A beauty contest is organized in which the young women are judged by their physical qualities, being are enlisted some on the basis of relationships, some on the basis of misogynistic criteria. Formalism and propaganda language, inefficiency and ineptitude of bureaucratic systems meet in a comedy of the absurd. Some of the satirized failures are systemic, others belong to human nature and its eternal morals and weaknesses. In one form or another the script of this film could have been written by Moliere or by Ionesco.
Forman‘s film is a concentrate of sarcastic satire. Each of the characters has his or her role in the story and his or her distinct personality, even if present on the screen for only a few seconds. The pace is marked by the choreography of the movement of the characters in the dance scenes in sync with the movements of the camera and by the soundtrack, in which the ball orchestra plays loud music. Laughter sometimes turns into a shout of pain, and the two final scenes are symbolic and at the same time of an irresistible black comic. Comedy of morals meets political cinema in this unique film. Seen today from a historical perspective, it can be said that ‘The Firemen’s Ball‘ describes all the reasons (bureaucracy, propaganda, corruption) that have led to the collapse of the structure of the communist states but is also a reflection upon human nature that transcends political systems and upheavals.