Word: jaromil
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...reality. Theirs is one of close, almost microscopic observation; they find "in that microcosm of human action a portrait of the social reality as a whole" This accounts for the political dimension of a film with an apparently nonpolitical subject, such as Firemen's Ball, 1968. Others, like Jaromil Jires (The Joke, 1968) preferred social analysis and political generalizations, while Chytilova's Dazies or Nemec's Report on the Party and the Guests are philosophical tales in the Voltairian sense of the word...
...were faced with the following choice: emigration abroad or "internal emigration." For most of the directors who stayed, the "normalization" meant no longer being allowed to shoot the kind of films they wanted. Sometimes they had to agree to film according to the expectations of the new regime. Thus Jaromil Jires, who revealed his extraordinary talent with The Cry (1963), and confirmed it with The Joke (1968), (a powerful critique of Stalinism), and with his surrealistic tale Valerie and her Week of Wanders (1969), last year completed a new movie about the construction of the Prague subway, with a heavy...
...Jaromil indeed becomes a poet. He tries to spy on the maid as she takes her bath, and fails, but produces a vivid poem about his "aquatic love." The genius of lyric poetry, Kundera observes, "is the genius of inexperience ... We can scoff at the poet's lack of maturity, but there is something amazing about him too. His words sparkle with droplets that come from the heart, and that gives his verse the luster of beauty. These magic dewdrops need not be stimulated by real life events. On the contrary, we suspect that the poet sometimes squeezes...
...novelist is not shy about invoking the names of such famous poetic asses (as he sees them) as Rimbaud, Keats, Shelley and Victor Hugo. In wicked parody of their legends, he kills Jaromil off at 20. The young poet attends a party one cold night and insults another writer, who locks him out of the apartment on a balcony. Jaromil pridefully refuses to beg to be let back in, catches pneumonia and dies of asininity...
Kundera commits some of the funniest literary savaging since Evelyn Waugh polished off Dickens in A Handful of Dust. Running through it is some wonderfully comic sexual burlesque-as, for instance, when Jaromil and his girl are making love, and his mother, hearing her moans (and knowing perfectly well what is happening), comes rushing into the room with a bottle of medicine and a teaspoon...