Larks on a String

A group of men work in a scrapyard. All of them were sent there as remnants of the old order: a dairyman who refused to hand over his shop, a barber, a saxophonist, a prosecutor, a man who will not work because of his faith. Nearby there are women held in a similar camp. The men and the women watch each other from the two sides of a fence. Meanwhile propaganda photographs are taken for the newspaper. Jiří Menzel directs, from the writing of Bohumil Hrabal, with the two of them writing the screenplay together. The tone is comic. The repression is not shown directly but delivered through absurdity: slogans nobody believes, ceremonies that achieve nothing, and daily life carrying on. It was finished in 1969, immediately after the suppression of the Prague Spring. It was never released and was shelved; Menzel could not work for years. The film emerged twenty one years later, after the regime changed, and won the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival in 1990. When it took the prize the director was fifty two and the film was twenty one. At the centre of it is this: people fall in love, marry and make jokes even in the worst conditions. The system cannot manage that. Who it is for: viewers who like the Czech new wave and political satire. Who it is not for: the plot is loose, there are many characters, and the target of the humour is lost without the context of the period.