All My Good Countrymen

The end of the War brings a Communist government; in a small Moravian village, the hard-working, close-knit community of farmers find themselves forced to collectivize... and the singing ends.

It's a diffusely told story, centered around Radoslav Brzobohatý, who fights an increasingly lonely war of his own to remain his own man, and yet part of the community. Can a few aging farmers fight corrupt men backed by an uncaring government?

Well, this seems to have been a last gasp of individualism in a rise sea of oppression. Yes, all the scenes of beauty are group scenes, where the people gather, musical instruments magically appear, and people sing. But the brass band playing the old songs vanishes, and the most beautiful scene, where the neighbors come to help Brzobohatý harvest his wheat, is worthy of Millais.

Although I was unaware of the name, Vlastimil Brodsky, I recognised the face immediately from his obituary photograph in a newspaper the other day, a face as distinctive and unforgettable as that of Louis Jouvet or Michel Simon. Brodsky brought distinction to a number of fine Czech films particularly in the '60's. but it is his performance of Ocenas, the organist in Vojtech Jasny's "All My Good Countrymen", that I remember most. The obituary prompted me to take another look at this fine cinematic product of the Prague Spring. Unfortunately it followed the fate of two other politically liberating films of the period, "Funeral Ceremony" and "The Ear", by being banned during the years of repression that followed, only to resurface with the collapse of communism. Their rediscovery was one of the most important cinematic events in recent years. The title "All My Good Countrymen" is not without irony as this epic tale of Czech village life from shortly after the end of the second world war concentrates on the activities of a group of friends who are not beyond reproach in siding with a politically corrupt regime for material advancement. Are these the "good countrymen" of the title or does it refer to the rest of the village who scorn these petty authority figure with silent contempt? By portraying the friends sometimes with quirky affection and sometimes as petty bullies, the director displays a certain moral ambiguity that makes one feel that the message behind it all has not quite been fully thought out. Another area of puzzlement is the three strange deaths that punctuate the narrative flow. They have an almost dreamlike quality, but, powerful as they are, their significance is not entirely clear. Where the film wholly succeeds however is in its wonderful evocation of time and place. The passing of seasons, particularly winter landscapes, have a beauty that is quite breathtaking. The symphonic score by Svatopluk Havelka, a rich tapestry of ostinato figures, beautifully compliments these landscape interludes while an unaccompanied trombone solo highlights the three moments of death. But it would be wrong to give the impression that "All My Good Countrymen" is a film where style matters more than substance. The use of a silent village crone, generally seen in closeup at moments of crucial drama, brilliantly sums up the stupidity of so many of the main characters' actions - an inspired use of a type of wordless Greek Chorus. In fact the film is often at its most powerful when it uses silence. Note the wonderfully poignant use of gesture when the honest young farmer takes leave of his family on his arrest. It is at moments such as this that the film achieves greatness.

Possibly the most famous work of the nonagenarian Czech filmmaker Vojtech Jasný, ALL MY COMPATRIOTS is a trenchant allegory of life under the Communist regime, shot with sublime bucolic élan and fairly won him the BEST DIRECTOR honor in Cannes.

Inhabited in an idyllic Moravian village, this close-knit community Jasný rounds up is particularly male-oriented, a patriarchal microcosm where the fate of ordinary lives is steered by an intangible hand. From the film's time span (1945 to 1958), inhabitants are divided by political views, tormented by past deeds, succumbed to ludicrous idiocy or outrageous hatred, united behind one good guy but also crumbled when things become menacing. Overall, Jasný manages to flesh out a vivid smorgasbord of characters living under shifting sands with none-too-heavy-handed snippets center on their objects: a four-square peasant (Brzobohatý, full of fortitude), a shifty photographer, a guilt-ridden drunkard (Matuska, strikingly entrancing), a displaced organist, a cleft-lipped thief, an ill-fated postman among others; whereas in the petticoat front, we have a running gag of a jinxed merry widow, whoever dares to court her would be pretty soon pushing up daisies.

But, the film's strength and value does not reside in the circumspect plot construction, because Jasný doesn't offer a rounded inspection of the state of affairs, most of the time, audience are passive witnesses of the unjust happenings but barring from peering into the machinations behind those (Communist) persecutors and connivers (they are all schematically depicted as surly pawns), thus it manifests that Jasný's standing point might not be entirely objective, it has Jasný's autobiographic influence notwithstanding, but no more a convincing censure of the regime than a frank rumination of an existential philosophy and his unbiased view of the hoi-polloi (both affectionate and matter-of-fact).

Actually what makes this film a marvel to any new audience is its ethnographic portrait of the place and its people, Jasný has an extremely keen eye on faces and lights, the portraitures he captures are magnificent to say the very least (particularly the furrowed visages of the elderly), and sonically, its nostalgic soundtrack (organ pieces, lyrical strains) and diegetic music sequences serve as excellent ballast to those indelible images, somehow, the film is sublimed itself into something might surpass even Jasný's intention, something should be enshrined as an ardent reportage of its locus and time, a deathless enterprise finds its solid toehold amongst a vastly manifold Czechoslovakian cinema.

Satantango is my all-time favorite movie. It's about a small town and the dissolution of its collectivized farm after the end of communism. All My Good Countrymen (the title on my DVD, though listed on IMDb as All My Compatriots) is about a similar small town, but it's about the period of collectivization instead of de-collectivization. In All My Compatriots, there is a steady demoralization of the townspeople as the collectivization and politicization moves along from 1945 to 1958. If you follow that trajectory until the collapse of the Soviet Union, you get to the lethargic, soul-destroyed nadir from which Satantango begins. Even though All My Compatriots is about a Czech town, and Satantango takes place in Hungary, it's remarkable how similar the towns feel and how much the one movie feels like the continuation of the other.

While Satantango is an unusually long movie (over 7 hours!), it felt like it moved along a lot faster than Compatriots. (Satantango isn't fast-paced by any means; but time goes by faster than in Compatriots because it manages to mesmerize in a way Compatriots does not.) Besides its slowness, Compatriots was also rather hard to follow. Nonetheless, Compatriots had a quirky quality I liked, and it's especially interesting as a movie made during the Prague Spring. Also, the town and landscape had a delightful Brueghel-like quality, and many of the faces made me feel like Fellini had managed to slip into Eastern Europe to shoot the close-ups.

An excellent film that takes a group of villagers as allegorical characters for Czechoslovakian society. The film follows these people from post-WWII (and pre- communism) to the late 50s, watching as they and their village change. In terms of the unescapable creeping feeling of dread, I was reminded of Ang Lee's _The Ice Storm_. While the film is clumsy at times (some shots or plot shifts might have been done better), the cinematography can be very resourceful. Watch also for the classic symbols of Czech identity: the geese, the white horse (from the legend of Libuse), and the old women (from the Czech novel _Babicka_). These mirror the plot nicely.