Closely Watched Trains

 SPOILER ALERT! The plot will be discussed.

I occasionally write a post about a film my movie class watched and discussed at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute. We recently saw Closely Watched Trains, a Czechoslovakian film which is a tragicomedy that received the Best Foreign Language Oscar of 1966. The story takes place in that country during the Nazi occupation. There is a sarcastic saying that fascist countries can make the trains run on time. The line may imply that the machinery of the state dehumanizes people. It follows that the compensation for the loss of freedom is not worth the sacrifice paid by the dominated citizens. The trains in this context also may be a reference to the shipping of Jews to concentration camps. The placement of the story in the past allowed the filmmakers to make hidden references to the oppression Czechoslovakia suffered under Russian rule.

The film centers on Milos Hrma (Vaclav Neckar), who comes from a family of lazy losers. His great grandfather was a soldier, but students hit him with a stone, and he retired early. Milos says, “he didn’t do anything after that except buying a bottle of rum and a pack of tobacco every day.” His train-driver father retired early and just sits around all day. Milos is an apprentice train dispatcher at a small station. He enjoys wearing his new uniform and when his cap is placed on his head, the image suggests a mock coronation, implying the grandness of the ceremony is only in Milos’s head.

The train dispatcher, Hubicka (Josef Somr), is a ladies’ man, apparently having had many sexual conquests. He exhorts Milos, a virgin, to pursue the conductor, Masa (Jitka Scoffin), who shows an interest in Milos. At her urging, they attempt to have sex, but the inexperienced and anxious Milos has a premature ejaculation and is unable to consummate the act. Milos is in such despair that he attempts suicide, but is rescued. As he is carried to a physician, Milos is naked except for a wrinkled sheet covering his lower body. The image resembles Michelangelo’s Pieta. Could this be a foreshadowing of the need to have an individual sacrifice for the good of the many?

The doctor tries to calm Milos down, telling him what he underwent was common, and to think about other topics so as not to climax so quickly. The class disagreed as to whether the tone of the film was inconsistent, taking a light-hearted view of sex and then combining it with the topic of Nazism and suicide. The film does not depict the brutality of the Nazis, which is consistent with its lighter approach, but it also downplays the repression that the Czechs were undergoing.

Hubicka charms the telegraphist, Zdenicka (Jitka Zelenohorska), into letting him use the station’s rubber stamps to place print marks on her thighs and buttocks. I wondered if this playful activity on the surface suggested its demonic opposite which was the tattooing of numbers on those interned in the concentration camps. At the least, it makes fun of the overemphasis on bureaucracy.

Zdenicka’s mother observes the print on her daughter’s body while the young woman is asleep, and is in an outrage. She ironically lifts the girl’s skirt to show just about anyone what an outrageous act was done, at the same time being even more outrageous by exposing her daughter’s behind. She takes Zdenicka to the pompous Zednicek (Vlastimil Brodski), the Councilor, who is a Nazi collaborator, who previously espoused Nazi propaganda. He is emotionless in listening to the mother’s complaints. The whole episode suggests an abandonment of valuing human feelings for efficient regimentation.

There were comments by members of the class that the movie seemed to be preoccupied with sex, and that women were portrayed as sex objects willing to satisfy the urges of the men. It could be that given the state of the country, sex was a diversion from the Nazi oppression. A resistance agent, Viktoria (Nada Urbankova), brings explosives to the train station to get the workers to blow up a German train carrying ammunitions. She is older than Milos and is successful in making him sexually efficient. Her character, as well as the other uninhibited women, show females awakening the latent masculinity of the males and empowering them to act.

After feeling that he is no longer a “flop” but is now “a real man,” Milos says, “I cut myself off from the past entirely.” He detaches himself from the failed men in his family and his own prior ineptitude. Milos takes the bomb with a timer and climbs a tower which spans the train tracks. When the Nazi train carrying ammunition passes under him, Milos drops the explosive onto it. But, he pays the price for his heroic action as a German soldier on the train shoots him. Milos falls onto the train. In Elizabethan times, death and sex were equated, since the sexual climax in poetry was depicted as a sort of bodily release.

After the train travels away, there are several detonations, and the train is destroyed. The explosions could be seen as an orgasmic eruption against repression. The blast blows Milos’s cap near Masa’s feet. Because he has redeemed his family, fellow workers, and himself, the head covering can now truly be seen as a crown of distinction.

The next film is Wall Street.