All My Good Countrymen

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.

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.

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.

'All my compatriots' (original title ' Vsichni dobrí rodáci') tells the story of seven friends from a small town in Czechoslovakia and we join them in 1948, they are on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain and the new Communism is thrust on this agricultural society. The seven friends are used as a vehicle to shine a light on the shortcomings of collectivisation and the corruption that seemed to be concomitant when power is used to deprive others of wealth.

The story slowly distils to one of resistance albeit within the spirit of the law and that is in the shape of Frantisek. This was promptly banned by the Soviets after the 1968 invasion and sadly never had the impact it should have done and that is despite winning Best Director and the Jury Prizes at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival.

It is filmed and framed very beautifully and all of the acting is of the highest calibre. It has a maudlin quality that is juxtaposed against the strength of will displayed by some of the main players. Some of the shots will stay with you too and very real people have been used to give added authenticity to the whole thing. This is a film for those who really appreciate cinema in all its glorious forms.

A too long, too meandering and, in my opinion, too simplistic look at life in a Soviet Czechoslovakian village. The Communists, with the notable exception of the film's narrator, are pretty much all scumbags, while the anti Communists are all firmly stuck in either the Noble or Warmly Human Peasant tradition. However, despite these drawbacks, I found myself becoming increasingly sucked into director Vojtech Jasny's world until, by film's end, I didn't want to leave. Don't know why this was exactly although I suspect Jasny's poetic, luminous style, with its abundance of lovely music and cinematography and moments of genuine pathos, such as the suicide of a petty thief who cannot face incarceration , and the vagaries of fate when the wrong man is assassinated have a lot to do with it. Give it a B plus. PS...Is it just my imagination or is the opening shot of church spires rising above a rural landscape a lot like the opening shot of "Places In The Heart"? (i.e. I'd bet my pierogi that Robert Benton's seen this film).