czechoslovakia, 1968, czechI’m not nearly Czech enough to understand most of this, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Summers are a special treasure, lusty old men perhaps somewhat less so.
JIŘÍ MENZEL
Capricious Summer
My mother has somewhat recently developed a serious interest in doing genealogical research on her family. It’s particularly interesting given that her ancestors were from a diaspora population and her parents were refugees. Through this research she’s discovered that at least part of her family spent a few hundred years living in what is now called Czechia, but was called Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Perhaps that historic link is what led me to enjoy this film a lot more than I thought I would when it first started. I am nowhere near Czech enough to understand it fully, that’s for sure. But somehow something came through that I found increasingly pleasant to watch. Even as the things happening to the characters were increasingly of, shall we say, mixed pleasantness.
There is something eternal I suppose about the ennui of an unremarkable summer. As well as something about the foolishness some men get up to in their dotage. All it takes is one pretty young thing, who is, for entirely unexamined reasons, willing to entertain the notion of them, for all three men to completely fall apart. It’s simultaneously amusing and awful.