Before Glastnost, There Was "Larks" (From 'The Boston Globe') - (By Jay Carr, Globe Staff - Friday, March 8, 1991) - Movies - http://maxpages.com/czechcinema/Boston_Globe

"Larks on a String"
Directed by: Jiri Menzel, Screenplay by: Menzel and Bohumil Hrabal, Starring: Vaclav Neckar, Rudolf Hrusinsky, Jitka Zelenhorska, Vladimir Ptacek, Vlastimil Brodsky, Jaroslav Satoransky, Playing at: Coolidge Corner (in Czech, subtitles) Unrated

Of the banned Eastern bloc films we have thus far seen, none is gentler or more upbeat than Jiri Menzel's "Larks on a String". Yet the Czech commissars knew what they were doing when they shelved it in 1969. Because it's so delicate, sweet-natured and humanly scaled, its political criticism is especially acute and resonant. "Larks on a String" is Menzel's masterpiece, although one hesitates to use such a word because of Menzel's sly puncturing of anything that pompously overstates its importance - like Communism. In anyone else's hands, the film's setting - a huge junkyard in a second-rate industrial city in the Stalinist '50s - would be glumly depressing. In Menzel's, it's an improbable playground.
It's a latter-day purgatory populated by a coveralled work gang - a cook, a professor, a prosecutor, a dairyman, a saxophonist - enemies of the state lazily tossing scrap metal typewriters, crucifixes and cribs toward meltdown and a new future as tractors and other glorious socialist props. 'To surpass and overtake,' exhorts a propaganda banner flapping impotently over prisoners dozing atop the huge slag heaps. At once Dantesque and evoking Marx's proverbial scrap heap of history, Menzel's microcosm paradoxically seems a humane island of intimacy. Of many exquisitely lovely moments, perhaps the loveliest comes when a guard whose sole job is to keep men and women apart literally joins the prisoners' circle of humanity around a fire, after being jolted into developing a humane view of his marriage to a shy gypsy.
It's typical of Menzel that even the bureaucrats are human. One quickly replaces his snazzy fedora with a worker's cap before a speech. The foreman, forever proclaiming his working-class origins, takes a Pilate-like (and slightly kinky) interest in hygiene. Yet he's the one who bends the rules to let a couple marry, after a fashion. Too knowing and too cunning to allow for a mere happy ending, Menzel provides something more exhilarating - a view that his characters will affirmatively search for one, no matter what. His star - insofar as the film has one - is Vaclav Neckar, who played the stationmaster's apprentice in "Closely Watched Trains". This time he's a cook who sweetly courts one of the women prisoners, but doesn't get her until he moves from generalized decency to particular sensitivity to her.
If it weren't for the bureaucrats' ability to make people disappear into black sedans, they'd be complete buffoons. As it is, they come close, although the meanest figure is a schoolteacher who viciously denounces the women prisoners, whose crime was trying to flee the country and who resemble older and younger sisters of Julia Roberts and Sophia Loren in their generous sensuality - a quality not lost on the men, who spend their off-hours peeping at them. The preposterousness of the charges against the men sentenced to political reeducation is typified by the librarian jailed for refusing to shred Western literature. Sitting atop his slag heap, cartoon-plump in his greasy coverall, dangling his legs, toddlerlike, while awaiting a ladder, he seems a cute stuffed toy, not a menace. Which, of course, is Menzel's intention. Vaclav Havel's government couldn't want a better calling card than "Larks on a String". It's spring on film.
(Copyright - Globe Newspaper Company)

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