The Wonderful Years That Sucked

The film covers some thirty years of an ordinary Czech family, from the early sixties to the Velvet Revolution. The son, Kvido, is born in a theatre during a performance of Waiting for Godot, and that birth marks out in advance a life inclined toward literature. Michal Viewegh’s semi-autobiographical novel put Kvido at the centre; Petr Nikolaev, making his first film, and the screenwriter Jan Novák shifted the weight onto his parents. Milena is a lawyer who acts on stage in her free time and constantly effaces herself; Aleš is a government employee who drifts wherever the wind takes him. Their lives change hard with the occupation of Prague in 1968. The film’s strength is that it tells large history from inside a small flat; the regime is not seen directly but at the dinner table and at work. The record places the story after the Velvet Revolution, though the narrative runs up to it, and gives the running time as 97 minutes where sources say 109.