Before Tonight is Over (1965) “Someone Will Die” (Review)

Released to Second Run Blu-ray this week, Peter Solan’s 1965 film Before Tonight is Over is a real hidden gem waiting to be discovered by all like-minded fans of the Czech New Wave movement. It tells the story of an evening in a nightclub in the Slovak mountain resort of the High Tatras, a night where drink will flow and souls will slowly be bared. Kvetinka (Stano Dančiak) and Miloš (Marián Labuda) are two young plumbers enjoying an evening on the town. Kvetinka is smartly dressed in a three-piece suit, handsome and confident, whilst Miloš is portly and prone to embarrassment. Both are hoping to meet girls and believe their look is in when they spy two attractive and exotic looking women they mistakenly presume to be Polish; the brunette Mira (Jitka Zelenohorská – best known for her performance a year later as the telephone operator in Jiří Menzel’s Closely Observed Trains) and the blonde Olga (Jana Gýrová). Meanwhile, propping up the bar is Július Pántik’s Baláz, a garrulous middle-aged man whose intention to splash the cash buy everyone a drink borders on the passive-aggressive when it is revealed that his kindness must be accepted solely on his terms. Also in the club that evening are Holub (Vladimír Durdík) a retired army major and veteran of Tobruk who has now turned to drink, a German travelling salesman whose romantic advances towards Olga are hampered by the language barrier, an electrician whose heart is fit to burst with pride at the design installations he has provided for the club, and the club’s manager and barmaid.

On the surface, Before Tonight is Over stands apart from its Czech New Wave contemporaries; the singular nightclub setting is certainly unusual and distinctive enough, whilst the seemingly carefree high-life of an evening on the town – a universal experience to be sure – is one that initially does not appear to be exploring life under the Communist regime in any great deal. The characters aren’t the kind of positive role models one would expect the censors – who, let’s remember, answered to Russia – to happily endorse either. But scratch that surface and you’ll see that what Solan has to say here about life in 1960s Czechoslovakia is just as important and insightful as that of Miloš Forman, Jiří Menzel, Vojtěch Jasný, Věra Chytilová and any other of his peers you’d care to name and who are now rightly regarded as giants of the Czech New Wave movement. The nightclub setting actually allows Solan to explore a cross-section of Czech society in great detail, and finds a group of people whose lives are unmistakably affected by the regime they live under, brushing up against its stifling restraints with the tantalising allure of life in the West and all that Capitalism seems to offer.

Money is an obvious theme here. Kvetinka and Miloš don’t have enough of it to entertain the girls; the former resorts to selling his watch in the club’s kitchens to purchase a bottle of Napoleon brandy – the most expensive and therefore most aspirational drink the establishment has to offer – but still, he does not have enough. Baláz sees the younger man’s embarrassment and offers to purchase the bottle for him, but Kvetinka, having seen the older man almost come to blows with the drunken Miloš at a perceived slight to his gratitude, refuses to accept this gift. It transpires that Mira and Olga are of course not Polish at all and are instead two clerks who have saved their money up for two whole years to enjoy a few nights of the good life at the resort itself, before returning to the doldrums of their nine to five existence in the town. The manager of the club is solely concerned with his takings, whilst the electrician-cum-designer finds that his social mobility (and presumably the extra wealth that brings him) impresses not the ex-major, who enquires if he can fix his mother’s vacuum cleaner for him. Speaking of the veteran of Tobruk, he has the money to squander on alcohol – his solace for twenty years of being “picked on”. The implication is clear, his war record counts for nothing now he has fallen out of favour with the Communist regime; respect and prestige now eluding him, he has decided to climb into the bottle. The German salesman has the money, but not the ability to communicate effectively with Olga – whose abrupt return to the club after leaving with him moments earlier lends the film an unsettling though unspoken note about the language barrier. And then there is arguably the most intriguing of the group, Baláz – whose generosity only stretches so far as his own terms, exerting control over how his purchases must be dispensed and when they must be drunk. At the close of the film, after his embarrassing attempt to join the house band on the trumpet sees the police called to escort him from the premises, he reveals that the course of his good fortune has been the wage packets of his workforce. He has squandered the rewards of several people’s hard work and betrayed their trust to experience for himself the life of a high-roller for just one evening. The film’s title, which is somewhat enigmatically elaborated upon by Kvetinka’s claim to the anxious, hapless Miloš that “Tonight someone will die” seems to allude to Baláz’s fate. He won’t actually die of course, but the life of a carefree, wealthy man that he enjoyed for a few hours inevitably comes to a dramatic halt once the origins of his money have been revealed. It is the death of the big spender right there on the club’s now empty dancefloor before, just as the girls are to expect, normality beckons. Likewise, with hindsight, you can argue that even this mildly carefree nature which everyone enjoys here will also soon ‘die’, when Soviet Russia crushed the blossoming ‘Prague Spring’ just three years later.

Remarkably, Solan used the film’s screenplay only as a guide for what he intended to capture on film, allowing his actors the freedom to improvise. This was a departure for Slovak cinema and ensured he captured spontaneous reactions from performers who were confronted by unexpected dialogue and situations. His experiment also saw him employing several cameras during filming which meant that none of the actors could be sure what angle they were being filmed from or if they were even in shot. The decision to film in such a manner not only adds spice to the encounters between each character and the ensuing rivalries – specifically between Kvetinka and Baláz – it also helps to create an authentic atmosphere to the comings and goings of the club itself, ensuring that the audience is left with the feeling that they too are in the thick of the action, seated in the bar, eavesdropping and observing the characters. The way Solan frames the film too, commencing with the club’s preparations for opening and concluding with it closing for the night, is interesting too. Both scenes feature a man in dark glasses attempting to gain entry to the club, only to be turned away because it is too early/too late. He even reappears midway through the film, only to be shown the door again because the club is full – a coachload of traditionally dressed Czech villagers have arrived to witness the club goers and their modern ways, specifically dancing (speaking of dancing, the club employs entertainment in the shape of a troupe of scantily clad and somewhat acrobatic dancing girls who appear at intervals and suggest a kind of hankering for the perceived decadency of the West) as if the clubgoers are animals in a zoo. This scene is a strange one and not necessarily explained; why are the villagers of the mountainous region just turning up to observe for a few minutes anyway? I’m left to wonder if Solan, in planting these peripheral observers into the mix, was suggesting that they were the avatars of the audience, with the man in the shades somehow representing them taking their seat at the start of the film and their leave at its finale.

As is often the case with Czech productions from this era it seems like the phase of ‘Normalisation’ that was enforced after the Soviet invasion of 1968 ensured that Before Tonight is Over faded from view and into obscurity. But like the work of his contemporaries, rediscovery beckons in the shape of this release from Second Run, and I urge fans of Czech New Wave to seize the opportunity. Once again the distributor excels themselves with a package that includes a new HD transfer of the Slovak Film Institute’s own 2K restoration of the print, a documentary discussing the film and the overall contribution Solan made to Czech cinema, and two short films; High Tatras from 1969 and Operation BL from a decade earlier.

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Thanks for reading Mark’s review of Before Tonight is Over

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