It's a nice day, everyone's having a good time, there's a picnic. Some strangers show up to play some "jokes" that seem suspiciously like an ideological coup in 1966's A Report on the Party and the Guests (O slavnosti a hostech). Banned in its home country of Czechoslovakia for many years due to its perceived criticism of Communism, the film is very simple but very sly.
A group of bourgeois friends are enjoying a lazy lunch in the grass when they spot a distant group of revellers. Thinking they're heading to the same banquet they are, the picnickers stumble towards the main road. One of them finds an aggressively smiling stranger (Jan Klusak) suddenly locking arms with him.
He's with a group of sullen faced young men in ties. The amiable picnickers are reluctantly ushered into lines hastily drawn in the dirt. They're told they're now in a room and two dashes on the ground mark the door. One man among the picnickers of a certain disposition encourages everyone to play along. Another becomes angry and marches straight through a "wall".
It's hard to say exactly what philosophy the interlopers espouse only that they're very keen on controlling everyone under a flagrantly false veneer of good fellowship. The film successfully boils down a large political phenomenon to a more personal situation. You see, quite credibly, the process through which authority establishes itself while constantly protesting that it isn't authority at all. And you can see how flagrant, unchallenged hypocrisy gives it infinite license.
A Report on the Part and the Guests is available on The Criterion Channel.
No comments:
Post a Comment