Film: Larks On A String
Release date: 14th March 2011
Certificate: 15
Running time: 90 mins
Director: Jirí Menzel
Starring: Rudolf Hrusínský, Vlastimil Brodský, Václav Neckár, Jitka Zelenohorská, Jaroslav Satoranský
Genre: Comedy/Drama/Romance
Studio: Second Run
Format: DVD
Country: Czechoslovakia
Jiří Menzel, one of the all time greats of Czech cinema, first came to international attention in 1967 with his first feature, Closely Watched Trains, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Menzel’s Larks On A String was shot in 1968 but was suppressed by the Czech government for twenty-one years, until the fall of the Communist regime in 1990. Upon release, this long-lost black political comedy garnered wide acclaim, winning the Golden Bear at the 1990 Berlin Film Festival. The film is now receiving a UK DVD release through Second Run, with digitally remastered sound and picture.
Again collaborating with novelist Bohumil Hrabal, as he did with ...Trains, Menzel sets his picture in an oppressive industrial heartland, all creaking masses of metal junk, cold weather and sinister surveillance. This junkyard’s function is to smelt down scrap metal to create tractors and washing machines for the Communist party, yet its workers are a motley crew of ‘bourgeois elements’ sentenced for re-education through labour, including a philosophy professor, a lawyer, a saxophonist, a milkman, and a believer in God.
The other half of the junkyard is worked by a group of beautiful, kind-hearted women, ‘enemies of the state’ imprisoned by the regime for attempting to defect. The film’s plot follows both groups as they attempt to interact, forging emotional connections at odds with the strict, dehumanising regime calling the shots. A romance blossoms between a worker and a prisoner, dissenters are taken away by sinister men in suits, and a prison guard’s new marriage is portrayed as hilariously dysfunctional, the product of a society who’s demands on its people come at the expense of honesty, communication and emotional connection...
Larks On A String may strike some at first glance as a quaint and amusing farce. Its humour, at times, may seem silly, gentle or dated, but look a little closer and the film’s angry political convictions become clear. Menzel and Hrabal’s piece is a biting satirical attack on the dehumanising effects of communism on the individual.
Propagandist signs adorn the scrapyard, wryly juxtaposing slogans like ‘Rejoice! We are Working for Ourselves’ and ‘To Surpass and Overtake’, with images of our luckless bourgeois heroes sleeping or playing cards amongst the rubble. In fact, these men are part of the rubble, being ruthlessly crushed - forced to make way for the new world order. As the snooty party official says at one point, “We’ll melt them down into a new kind of people.” The chaos, danger and uncertainty of the piles of junk mirror the internal conflicts of the yard’s labourers.
There is a very tangible sinister undertone at play throughout the film, as those who speak out are taken away in cars and party officials wash local children with disturbing pleasure. Targets are increased without consultation, freedom of speech is denied, and, in one heartbreaking sequence, an old lady is worked so hard she cannot enjoy her own birthday meal, prepared with great love and care by her son. The ideals of the workers’ revolution, Menzel suggests, are an absurd sham. It is the workers, both blue and white collar, who still suffer.
The film’s main method of conveying this message is, however, through humour, ridiculing the hypocrisies of the party – a state official removes his tie and briefcase before addressing the men – and the uptight humorlessness of its bureaucrats. The film is dense with absurd little jokes: a worker is issued a written warning which he immediately uses as a serviette. “This man,” states the official, “will not die of natural causes.” The prison guard’s new wife refuses to share a bed with him, and they end up sleeping on top of a wardrobe.
As for the other side of the yard, the female prisoners are less well-explored. They are unanimously beautiful, a symbol of their innate goodness which is, perhaps, slightly over-simplistic. Their situation, however, still gets across the absurd harshness of the regime effectively. These so-called enemies of the revolution are simply nice young women whose only crime was to attempt to leave the country. The line which symbolically divides the two groups is gradually transgressed throughout the film, suggesting that the human spirit is, for Menzel, stronger than any party manifesto.
Whilst appearing a little gentle, at times, the history of this film’s censorship gives some indication of its political conviction. Underneath its silliness lie profound themes of alienation and a visceral anger at Czechoslovakia’s communist overlords. Without slipping into dogmatic lecturing, the film cleverly warns of the negative effects on the individual of bureaucratic heartlessness. The film’s tone of absurdist humour proves to be, in the end, its greatest weapon in exposing the absurdities of its target. KI
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