Absurdity

Closely Watched Trains is a series of contradictions: a tragic comedy, a peaceful war movie, a success story of a failure. The failure is Miles, a railway apprentice (Vaclav Neckar), who somehow never gets his signals straight. The fault, shown in whacky flashbacks, appears to be his pedigree. His grandfather, a hypnotist, tried to stop a German tank by putting the whammy on it; his father, a railroad man retired at 48, has settled on a sin to his liking: sloth. Now, the boy prepares to ascend the family tree and take the inevitable fall.

Though World War II is raging on two fronts, his little station in Czechoslovakia is more worried about its own private conflicts. The paunchy stationmaster constantly clashes with the raunchy dispatcher (Josef Somr), whose life is a round of love-making on the waiting-room sofa. Milos refuses to take sides in the quarrel, and soon earns the enmity of both antagonists. A stiff-necked German official gives him lectures on the nobility of war, which he fails to understand. A nubile girl, Jitka Bendova, entices him into her bed, where he fails to perform. Suicidally, he slashes his wrists--and again flops.

By contrast, the dispatcher continues his express schedule of seductions, this time with the railroad telegraphist. During one encounter he playfully imprints her rear with a German occupation stamp--an indelible gesture that scandalizes her mother, who promptly trots daughter all over town, showing the handiwork to anyone who will look. Eventually, the crestfallen dispatcher is brought before a rubber-stamp congress of officialdom to account for his shocking behavior. Brandishing photographic evidence of the misdeed, a Nazi bureaucrat asks: "Miss Svata, is this your behind?", and prates about the "defamation of the German state language."

At this point, the story abruptly changes its mood. The dispatcher, it turns out, is also a member of the underground, a fact that leads to an explosive and tragic finale. Director Jifi Menzel mixes the real and the surreal, ribaldry and pathos, comedy and tragedy--yet keeps the movie on the track all the way. Much credit goes to Actors Somr and Neckar, who straight-facedly exemplify Gogol's view that "what is utterly absurd happens in the world."

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