Films from Czechoslovakia were among the hottest and most interesting topics of world cinema in the mid-60s. In 1966, when he made ‘Closely Watched Trains‘, Jirí Menzel was 28 years old and this was his first feature film. He won the Academy Awards for the Best Foreign Language Film, but his film was actually the second Czechoslovak film that enjoyed (two years apart) this precious recognition. From the perspective of more than half a century that has passed since the making of the film, the decision of the Academy jury of that year seems very inspired. ‘Closely Watched Trains‘ is a beautiful and human film, which uses as a pretext a genre of movies deprecated due to propaganda productions in order to tell a simple and emotional story, with credible characters, anti-heroes if you will, or simply ordinary people living in unusual times.
Train stations, and especially the small and lonely ones, were a perfect setting for many memorable films from the American productions to these of the Eastern European cinema. The station in ‘Closely Watched Trains‘ was located in central Europe, in the Czech Republic occupied by the Nazis, in the last year of the Second World War. The stationmaster obeyed the regulations, the railway inspector repeated the slogans of the Nazi occupiers, while ordinary people tried to live their lives. Milos, the main hero of the film (Václav Neckár) is a young man just out of adolescence, who inherits his retired father’s job at the train station. His magician grandfather had been crushed by the German tanks entering Prague while trying to stop them by hipnose (the scene was filmed 23 years before the events in Tiananmen Square). Milos’ thoughts are more on his own sexual performance in doubt after a failed experience in the company of an attractive ticket controller. The strictly guarded trains filled with German soldiers that continue to pass through the station will at some point bring the roller of history over the characters of the film. Innocence and the threat of death, coming to age and first loves, the desire to live and heroism, sex, absurd and death are combined in the story in a way specific to Czech literature and cinema. The film, like other by Menzel, is an adaptation of a novel by Bohumil Hrabal.
‘Closely Watched Trains‘ was one of the first films of world cinema to approach the theme of World War II in an absurdly humorist register and especially from a human perspective, of those who did not necessarily want to be involved, who did not seek heroism but nor did they belong to the despised category of the traitors. I do not know to what extent today’s viewers can appreciate not only the talent of the screenwriter and of the director but also their courage in making such a different and daring film under the conditions of communist ideological control in Cold War Europe. Each of the characters has humanity, color, and a distinct psychological profile. The story is told fluently, and there are many anthology scenes in this film. I already mentioned the scene of hypnotizing the tanks, I would add the car on rails that predicts the films of Emir Kusturica which carries the inspector or the scene in which the stationmaster’s wife gives Milos explanations life while caressing the long neck of a stuffed goose. With ‘Closely Watched Trains‘ Jirí Menzel made perhaps one of the best debuts in the history of the film. It is remarkable, however, that what followed never lowered by much the bar of quality.