Re-up: Loves of a Blonde (1965)
Forman’s exploration of love and dashed hopes in provincial Czechoslovakia
Country: Czechoslovakia
Director: Miloš Forman
Time: 1 hour and 22 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Criterion (free w/subscription), Archive.org (free)
What It Evokes: Wanderlust, youthful hopes dashed, ridiculous/hilarious parents
Because he understood people so well, Miloš Forman understood a party: the relational dynamics, the earnest and oblique entreaties between individuals navigating desire, the esteem (or its opposite) of friends and acquaintances who witness those perilous interactions, the boredom, the risk, the exuberance, the avoidance, the choreography of just revealing enough, the deceits (minor or major), the self-puffery (directed inwards or outwards), the host’s anxiety-prone orchestrations (successful or not), the defensive criticisms now lobbed towards the same object of desire after perceived rejection, the thrill of connection rediscovered and reciprocated, and the way alcohol can (among other things good and bad) expand the possible until it touches the threshold of absurdity. Each of the three Czech-language films Forman made prior to his US relocation following the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia feature long scenes set during festive gatherings organized by local factory supervisors, minor officials, or firemen’s associations.1 These scenes satirically reproduce society in miniature, while taking seriously the haphazard attractions and youthful searching that animate some within the crowd.
Forman’s second feature length film, Loves of a Blonde, charts the romantic twists and turns of its central character, Andula, who works in a shoe factory in an unnamed provincial town where the female-to-male ratio is 16:1—this demographic imbalance was loosely lifted from an actual factory town in northern Bohemia. In the film, the gender mismatch evokes much consternation on the part of the factory’s supervisor—it’s bad for morale! It’s also not ideal for someone searching for love. In order to address the issue, the factory supervisor convinces an Army Major to station a contingent of troops in the town. A dance is quickly organized. Problem solved!
While its hardly a major impediment to newly forged attractions, Andula does have a rather distant boyfriend (he’s rather married as well). Happily, a traveling pianist from Prague, Milda, captures her attention at the dance. (The soldiers comically do not.) Milda and Andula spend the evening together, making various commitments. For Andula, Milda represents excitement, escape, city life, and a break with underwhelming monotony. But his declarations of affection remain instrumental. He wants something now, not forever. When Andula goes to visit him in Prague, where she meets his unsuspecting and very suspicious parents, hilarity and heartbreak—twinned almost perfectly—ensue.
Forman’s early films get classed as part of the Czech New Wave, alongside works like the previously discussed Daisies (Věra Chytilová, 1966) and the much celebrated Closely Watched Trains (Jiří Menzel, 1966). This efflorescence of Czech cinema followed the emergence of wonderful Eastern Bloc cinema in the late 1950s—The Cranes Are Flying (USSR, 1957) and Ashes and Diamonds (Poland, 1958) are two standouts—which took advantage of the post-Stalinist Thaw’s more permissive environment, affording directors the ability to react against socialist realism’s perceived artificialities. (In the 1930s, the USSR had produced around 50 films per year, a number that fell into the low teens by the end of Stalin’s reign. Fascinatingly, Khrushchev’s 1956 Secret Speech to the Party Congress specifically attacked the the propagandistic nature of film production during Stalin’s later years.)
Into this mix came new films from Italy and France, also reacting against the perceived flaws of their national forebears. As a result, one finds the influence of Italian neorealism and the French New Wave throughout Forman’s early work—a debt acknowledged in interviews. Loves of a Blonde draws from those movements an aspirational “verisimilitude” (i.e. the use of non-professional actors, the absence of studio sets and artificial lighting, a focus on the “lived experience” of marginal or working class individuals—though naturally this last did not need to come to Czechoslovakia from Italy) and, for lack of a better term, nifty camera work and editing practices. It’s all there to be analyzed. All the same, Italian neorealism and the French New Wave both remain somewhat troubled terms, usefully capacious as organizational categories but more difficult as coherent analytical units. After all, any representation of “reality” mediated through an artistic form not only calls attention to its own construction, but also ignores at its own peril Kant’s observation that objects in the external world conform to cognition, instead of the reverse. (Thankfully for us all, this is not a Kant Substack.) Nonetheless, Forman’s work clearly engages with these movements broad thematic and cinematographic interests.
Happily, one does not love a film because it fits into a genealogy of influence. Instead, Loves of a Blonde remains such rich cinema in no small measure due to the immense generosity and compassion with which Forman treats his characters. His dominant approach encapsulates bemusement without condescension. No characters’ flaws wholly define them, which is perhaps a way of taking their “agency” seriously, though to speak of agency when it comes to characters constructed for the screen remains its own contradiction in terms. Loves of a Blonde explores young people who are inept at discussing the contours and limits of their desires, treating these subjects in a nuanced manner and locating the innate humor in misplaced hope without minimizing its emotional fallout. The film avoids a fraught (and thus tendentious and moralistic) treatment of bad behavior by underscoring its characters’ resilience and humanity, all the while honoring their hopes of transcending the monotonous and mundane.
Go Down The Forman Rabbit Hole With:
Miloš Forman — Black Peter (1965)
Miloš Forman — One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
The three films are Black Peter (1964), Loves of a Blonde (1965), and The Firemen’s Ball (1967).