"Closely Watched Trains", Part 2

Continuing from last week, Jiri Menzel's Oscar-winning Closely Watched Trains follows a milquetoast train dispatcher named Milos who wants little more than to lose his virginity and maintain his family history of sloth and apathy, no easy task in Nazi-occupied Czechslovakia.

Menzel’s film walks the line between crass sex gags and political nonconformity, a combination that must have proved irresistible to the Academy at a time when the old standards of censorship were crumbling to dust. But is it a sexually progressive heir to Chaplin's The Great Dictator, with its slight "hero" haplessly pulled into antiestablishment action like leaves in a swirling breeze? Or is it just a proto-teen sex comedy, with the standard Nobs v. Snobs setup given an artificial "heft" by setting it in a bleakly comic wartime world of collaborators and refugees?

Probably a bit of both, but even if the combination of sexual voracity and political apathy worked slightly better in Menzel’s 2006 I Served the King of England (which I reviewed in the SNR last March), Menzel is never at a loss for naughty-boy and/or morbid sight gags - an old man breaking up cigarettes into his pipe; a lecherous photographer cackling wildly as his house falls down around him; and the collaborative stationmaster attempting to take minutes at an impromptu meeting with Nazi officials while covered in pigeon poop.

I posted a picture last week from one of the film's best sight gags, an achingly uncomfortable scene in which the virginal Milos tries to talk the stationmaster's wife into deflowering him while she strokes a phallic goose neck.

As I said last week, "Closely Watched Trains" was obviously a huge influence on Altman's 1970 "M*A*S*H", with its similar themes of wartime slackers indulging in juvenile hijinks to forget their bleak, boring, and bloody existences. But as with I Served the King of England, Menzel's touch errs too far toward the precious, even when Milos and his oversexed conductor friend hatch a terrorist plot in the last third. It's a good film with a lot of clever moments, but like I said last week, it doesn't do much besides giggle at sex and cluck its tongue at Nazis and jerks. I can do that on my own time.

GRADE: B.

Later this week: "Fixed Bayonets!"