Step in the Right Direction (From 'The Jerusalem Post') - (By Dan Fainaru - Friday, July 20, 1990) - Movies - http://maxpages.com/czechcinema/Jerusalem_Post

Films like "Larks on a String" command respect if only because they were made in Eastern Europe in the late 60's and were never shown anywhere until early this year.
In this case, maybe it didn't take that much courage to make it, as it was a product of the 'Prague Spring', when the Dubcek regime held a lot of short lived promises. Certainly, considerable stamina was required to live it down afterwards, because unlike some of his colleagues (Milos Forman, Ivan Passer and Jan Nemec), director Jiri Menzel ("Closely Watched Trains"), did not leave Czechoslovakia. He took the interdiction of this film in stride and went on making the same kind of closely observed satirical little pieces - but with far more caution than he did before. At the same time, he built himself a parallel career on the stage, directing a prestigious theatre company in Bochum, West Germany.
Now released with all the other items locked in the secret drawers of the East European censors, it turns out that this was another victim of the famous fail-safe system that felled so many works of art for no good reason at all.
Not that it is such a great work of art. A sympathetic, ironic little film, "Larks on a String" would have hardly garnered all the laurels it did, including half the Golden Bear in Berlin, were it not for its glorious past. Being prohibited obviously meant that it was important; showing it now is evidently a step in the right direction, and who would dare stand in the way of progress?
Perhaps I am being a bit too harsh, but I have seen the picture twice, and both times was struck by its self-indulgence. It is blessed with the touch of fantasy one always finds in Menzel's films, but it's packed with far too many cute asides.
The action takes place in the early '50s, when the regime had firmly decided the bourgeoisie had to be broken down and smelted into a new working class. In order to achieve this, intellectuals were demoted from their jobs and invited to volunteer for 're-education' camps, where they were given a chance to cleanse their system with good, hard physical work.
That's how we meet a university professor who refuses to shred the works of Kant and Schopenhauer; a state prosecutor who maintains that the legal process needs a defender as well as a prosecutor; a musician who insists on playing the saxophone after being specifically informed it is a decadent imperialist instrument; a cook who refuses to work on weekends; and a barber who doesn't grasp quickly enough that proletarians are not supposed to waste their time getting hair cuts every week. They all work together, in an iron scrap yard.
They work next to a group of women prisoners serving sentences for trying to leave the Czech paradise without permission. While they labour under similar hardships, there is a distinct legal difference between the two groups: The men are volunteers and are therefore supposedly free, even if they have no choice but to stick with the hard labour; the women are criminals in the eyes of the law, and as such are not allowed any direct contact with other people.
There is no plot, in the real sense of the word, to tie all the elements of the piece together. Menzel indulges in long dialogues, offering each of the characters a chance to voice his feelings about the political system.
If there is a villain in the piece, it is the roly-poly union man. He plays a pretty sinister role in spite of his bonhomie and the constant reminders that he is one of the boys. The strongest link between the various disparate episodes is the romance flourishing in the scrapyard between the young cook and a lovely prisoner.
The screenplay was adapted from several short stories by Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal. This explains its fragmentary structure, which scriptwriters Hrabal and Menzel did not manage to overcome.
The best thing in the film are the details, the brief observations of life in a socialist heaven-to-be. The portrayals of the marriage by proxy between the cook and his prisoner sweetheart, or the black car that appears out of nowhere and swallows up anyone who dares to speak out of turn, are just two examples. The poetical touches, like the images of the scrapyard under rain, with everybody gathering for a bit of warmth (literal and symbolical) round the fire, the piles of typewriters, pots, pans, the furtive glances between men and women exchanged through rusty pipes and mountains of trash, are nicely created.
At times, it seems like these details and the codified messages they are supposed to deliver about life in Czechoslovakia are all there is. But Menzel allows himself to wallow over them a bit too much. The sad, gentle irony is evident; the film obviously did pinch the system where it hurt, but when viewed today, you're not sure these people had it so bad after all.
If the film is any indication, men and women could have a pretty good time of it. It's a bit like strict summer camp, with penalties if you were caught being mischievous, and basically not a bad way for some people who have spent too much time behind a desk, reading books and inhaling dust. Not many of those who have gone through the experience in real life, however, would concur with this opinion.
(Copyright - The Jerusalem Post)

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