Vtáckovia, siroty a blázni

Slovak director Juraj Jakubisko is often described as the Fellini of Eastern Europe. After the 1968 film The Deserter and the Nomads, he was put in exile in Czechoslovakia after the soviet invasion. With cooperation from a Paris film studio he made this film. Birds Orphans and Fools is a brilliant, surreal and underrated tragic comedy that not many people seem to know about. The story is about three orphans who have lost their families in war. Although the two men Andrej and Yurick and the lady Marta are adults, they act foolish like children trying to live life to the fullest. They resort with their landlord and other orphans in an bombed out church that is distorted with various shelves, cupboards and animals scattered about. But the main characters can't block out the pain of living in a war torn country, and after Yurick is put in prison and returns a year later, things will never be the same. Towards the end the climax becomes maybe one of the most tragic in cinema history. This was the first film in Jakubisko's trilogy of Happiness. If you enjoyed Truffaut's "Jules and Jim", Jodorowsky's "Fando & Lis" or Vera Chytilova's "Daisies", you have to see this film. The birds in the film are symbolic of the souls of the dead.

Shot immediately after the Soviet invasion of 1968, Jakubisko's Birds, Orphans and Fool is a free-wheeling allegorical film - playful, surreal and, finally, increasingly nightmarish. Involving energetic, childish, carefree adults which seems to be a popular art-house approach at this time period. An unconventional triangular relationship between three war orphans, two men and a Jewish woman, as they travail a war-torn landscape of bombed-out churches and wrecked homes, playing wild games that frequently cross the border into symbolism or the bizarre. Briefly discussing the meaning of life, playfully explore sex and play with old men and children that appear out of nowhere. They are products of an absurd world in which war, violence and death predominate. And represent a lawless, undisciplined society, a lifestyle of joyous madness, careless irresponsibility, repressed emotions and sudden violence, caused by despair and hardships. They are people who face a tough, violent world and survive by adopting a childlike philosophy of life and live a life of foolish, joyful denial.

This film is equal parts 1969 acid trip, socialist-era Eastern European allegorical political manifesto and mirror held up to the Slovak soul. Maybe the surreal aspect of the film is just an accident! In any case, this film shows us the rubble of Bratislava just after the Prague spring. Maybe Spring came late to Bratislava. Maybe it never came at all. There are some great (and classic) surreal scenes, but there is very little continuity to the story - in fact very little story per say at all. To recommend it, this film still has a cutting-edge feel more than 30 years after it was originally made. Its basic premise seems to be that life (or at least life in the Czechoslovak Soviet Socialist Republic at the end of the 1960s) drives one mad - and that madness leads to unthinkable barbarity. Hence the few truly nauseating scenes of violence. Still, a unique look at a unique place and time, with memorable images. View at your own risk.

I saw this film only once, about 20 years ago, along with several other Jakubisko works at a festival of Czechoslovak films, and it seemed rather undisciplined and unstructured compared to his better efforts. When he made it, it appears that he was more the art-school denizen than the film student. Later, he was to become a consummately disciplined film maker.

I interviewed him at the time, and he said that he had been very self-absorbed in the early part of his directorial career. Perhaps that explains some of the film's basic waywardness.

All that said, this is not a work to be dismissed. It has a certain antic charm, and a certain power. The characters are strongly conceived, and the way that they are realized gives the film much of its form and merit.

The English translation of the title is inaccurate and somewhat misleading, since its last word actually means madmen or crazy people rather than merely fools.

Juraj Jakubisko's thematically adventurous, visually arresting, allegorical drama is an energetically mounted film that can, perhaps, seem overwhelmingly kinetic at times! Frequently feeling like an unruly salvo of visual non-sequiturs and rapid, epigrammatic dialogue, but there is much bravura filmmaking to be discovered as Jakubisko's alluringly bonkers mise-en scene is anything but staid, and ace cameraman, Igor Luther's ceaseless invention is never less than exquisite to behold!

Watching the bawdy, increasingly surrealistic ménage à trois between gamine, Marta (Magda Vasaryova), handsome, self-destructive Yorick (Jiri Sykora) and the besotted, naive photographer Andrew (Philippe Avron) I couldn't help but recall the similarly galvanizing love attraction in Truffaut's immortal 'Jules et Jim'. Both films sharing an equally spirited, non-conformist approach to narrative, but with 'Birds, Orphans and Fools' I frequently 'felt' far more of the film than objectively understood it, which, overall made it an entirely fascinating existential experience.

The three young, altogether disparate adolescent lovers cavort uproariously, drink, make love and act the goat with a genuinely joyful abandon! Their desperately draughty, wholly derelict love nest, abounding in cheery chaos, amenably sharing their intimacies with an omnipresent flock of ceaselessly twitching birds. All this boisterously choreographed tumult careening to a rather grim conclusion that caught me totally unawares! I shall leave any profound political analysis to those with a more scholastic background, but for me, Czech visionary, Juraj Jakubisko's exhilarating, disorientatingly kaleidoscopic film is a deliciously psychedelic mind bomb. A winningly sensuous elegiac trip into an expressive, boldly uninhibited vista that one only really sees in the more exploratory examples of transgressive 60s cinema.

'Birds, Orphans and Fools' is an altogether edifying rush of hyperbolic celluloid pleasure! Not unlike 'Daisies' & 'Valerie and her week of Wonders', fellow Slovak fabulist, Jakubisko's restlessly vivid imagery percolates drug-like in the mind long after the celluloid reels have concluded spinning. I don't know exactly what it is about 60s & 70s Czech cinema that makes them so uniquely captivating, but so many have a singularly expressive, darkly mesmerizing melancholic beauty. Always inventive, and blessed with the most extraordinarily mellifluous and exciting soundtrack, Zdenek Liska's baroque, gorgeously uplifting themes are a constant delight!