A Track All Its Own (From 'Modern Film Scripts: Closely Observed Trains') - (By John Simon - 1971) - Movies - http://maxpages.com/czechcinema/A_Track_All_Its

Jiri Menzel's "Closely Watched Trains" is a film where everything works, including that most dangerous of devices, the shift, at the last moment, from comedy to tragedy. This 'piece de resistance' of the recent Czech cinema is a comic view of Czech resistance to the Nazis in which a bumbling youth tragicomically comes of age in sex and war. A dispatcher trainee at a puny railroad station, he has troubles with his work that stem from greater troubles with lovemaking, which terrifies him. The figures that surround him, notably the ambitious but inept stationmaster and a fly-specked Don Juan of a train dispatcher, are, like himself, drawn with a humor so sweeping that it would hurtle into satire or caricature were it not for the intense joviality and humaneness that inform it. Tenderness mitigates the farcical, a certain seriousness gives an edge to the laughter, and a lyricism in the photography and editing poeticizes the foolishness.
Few things lend themselves more readily to photographic exaggeration than trains, but their use here is judiciously sparse and visually lovely- they function, in fact, as a kind of wipe between sequences of the plot, and their sound is a 'ritornello' in the music of daily life. Menzel and his cinematographer, Jaromir Sofr, have achieved some of their most moving effects by the use of the camera unaided by anything except, perhaps, lighting and set design. The main devices are highly imaginative framing of the actors and eloquent use of the extreme close-up.
Thus, for example, the shy hero is shown very near the edge of the frame, or being marshaled toward it, so that his quality of timorous onlooker is conveyed by the composition. The camera often avidly closes in on an object; here, as in most of these Czech films, a suit that is being tried on, a rubber stamp, a pair of glasses, an old phonograph can produce an enormous visual and emotional impact. Thing are charged with an immanent glory that has nothing to do with materialism or fetishism; rather, it bespeaks a profoundly affectionate reverence for the artifacts that have become our companions in living.
Menzel's actors perform with uncanny ease. They, like almost all the new Czech actors, know not only how to be larger than life when necessary, but also how to be smaller. They have a way of rendering the trifling and irrelevant even pettier and more piddling than it is, extracting from it all the comedy or horror. Though not a single part, however short, is done less than expertly, Josef Somr, as the philandering dispatcher, is a veritable bastion of absurd fatuity, yet full of feckless geniality as well; if Czechoslovakia does not have an Oscar or Otakar, one should promptly be created for Somr. There is something so spontaneous, unconcerned, and complete about such a performance that it affects our entire sensorium- finger tips, nostrils, and palate no less than eyes and ears.
Menzel also appears as an accomplished comic actor in this and several other new Czech films. As a director, he reminds me most of Olmi, and, through Olmi, of their common master, Fellini. But there is also in him a visual and textural elegance that suggests Bergman and Antonioni. None of these influences, if such they be, is intrusive. The best thing about "Closely Watched Trains" is that it impresses one as unique, indebted ultimately only to its individual genius.
(Copyright - Lorrimer Publishing Limited)

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