Before the ball

I recommended Miloš Forman's wonderfully subversive The Firemen's Ball back in November. A movie that Forman made in his native Czechoslovakia before that, which is almost as good, is Loves of a Blonde, which is airing tomorrow morning at 9:15 AM ET on IFC.

The setting is Zruc, a small, grimy industrial town somewhere in the northern part of Bohemia. The main employer is the state-run shoe factory, which employs young women exclusively. As a result, there's a severe gender imbalance, which the Communist authorities try to alleviate by stationing a bunch of soldiers near the town. Then, the plan is to hold a dance for the soldiers and the factory workers, in the hopes that they'll fraternize. What really happens is something quite different: the men are a bit too randy for the women's liking, as they try to ply the women with drinks and get more than just a dance or two out of them. For the women, it's more an experience to be dreaded than a nice night out.

Young Andula, however, has a different time of it. She runs off to escape the oppressive atmosphere of the dance, and winds up upstairs, with Milda, the pianist from the jazz combo hired to perform the music for the dance. The two have a one night stand, before he has to go back home with the band to Prague. Milda tells Andula he'll write, and that she should come see him sometime, although he's probably saying this more out of politeness than any real conviction. After the dance, life returns to its depressing normality for the girls of the shoe factory.

Worse, Andula doesn't hear from Milda again. So, she sets off for Prague in an attempt to find him. She eventually finds what should be his apartment late one evening, but when she knocks on the door, opening it is... Milda's parents! It's clear that Milda never told them one word about Andula, and this is an unexpected surprise for them. Milda isn't there, as he's working another dance; it's late; and Andula has no place else to go, so what are Milda's parents to do? Eventually, they decide to let Andula spend the night in Milda's bed, and they'll deal with Milda when he gets back. Suffice it to say that it's not going to be a pleasant experience for poor Milda.

Loves of a Blonde is an excellent example of bleak comedy. I never lived in a Communist country, although I did study in the former Leningrad in 1992 just after the fall of the Soviet Union. Still, I grew up in a small town, and as I mentioned when recommending The Firemen's Ball, there's a striking similarity between the small-town atmosphere I grew up in, and that presented in both The Firemen's Ball and Loves of a Blonde. By the same token, the dingy public university spaces I experienced at St. Petersburg State University were remarkably like what Forman shows us at the two dances. Also, I had the opportunity to take the train from St. Petersburg to Helsinki, and a bus trip from St. Petersburg to Novgorod, both of which afforded me the opportunity to travel through less well-off smaller cities, of the sort that Zruc is. Zruc reminded me a lot of those places. The only thing I can't vouch for is the interior of the apartment where Milda and his parents live.

But, it's not just the sets that are good; it's the characterizations. Forman didn't use professional actors, and got realistic performances out of the people he used. Milda is acting unsurprisingly as a young man without real prospects, but energy and a desire for more out of life. Andula, on the other hand, is a bit naïve, and plays that well. You can see how she would fall for Milda in the first place, and then think that simply going to the big city to find him would solve all her problems. And as for Milda's parents, they're bewildered, because Andula's entry has obviously turned their world upside down. Loves of a Blonde doesn't have quite as much obvious humor as The Firemen's Ball. Instead, it's a subtler humor, but it still works, and still presents a pretty biting comedy on the state of Communist Czechoslovakia as it was in the mid-1960s.

Loves of a Blonde has been released to DVD, but like The Firemen's Ball, it's a bit pricier than normal movies.