The Joke

As a student, Ludvik writes a postcard to a girl he likes as a joke: optimism is the opium of mankind, long live Trotsky. The card reaches the party. He is expelled from the university, expelled from the party and sent to a punishment unit to work in the mines. Years later he plans to find the wife of one of the men who denounced him and seduce her. The revenge does not work; her husband had already left her. Jaromil Jireš directs. The source is Milan Kundera's novel and Kundera contributed to the screenplay. The narrative runs in two times, alternating the present revenge with the purges of the fifties. The subject is the impossibility of redress. Ludvik cannot get his life back and the revenge produces nothing; the narrative says so directly. It is among the last films of the Czech New Wave. The Soviet intervention came in 1968, the film was finished in 1969, and after a short release it was banned; it was withdrawn from circulation for twenty years. Kundera's novel was banned in the same period and the author left the country. The hardest section is the military prison and the mine; those passages are shown not as recollection but as they were. Who it is for: viewers who like the Czech New Wave and narratives of political reckoning. Who it is not for: the shifts in time are hard to follow, the historical context is dense, and the film provides no relief at any point.