Larks on a String (1969): saved from the scrapheap of censorship (Review)

Jiří Menzel’s Larks on a String, released on Blu-Ray for the first time by Second Run, won the Golden Bear at the 1990 Berlin International Film Festival – an impressive feat for any film, but a remarkable one when you consider Menzel’s film was twenty-one years old at that point. The reason for the Berlinale’s apparent change of eligibility rules was simple: Larks on a String was one of a number of late ’60s Czechoslovak films whose release was nixed entirely when the Soviet Union invaded the country and began a regime of strict censorship. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, international audiences had their first chance to see it, along with other banned Czechoslovak films like The Ear, Dragon’s Return and Birds, Orphans and Fools, all of which have also been released on Second Run. It all added up to make 1989 a banner year for Czechoslovak cinema, although not chiefly – in an irony Menzel would have enjoyed – because of any films made that year.

This isn’t Second Run’s first release of Larks on a String – they put out a DVD of it in 2011, and it formed part of their Czechoslovak New Wave Volume II box set in 2015, along with Miloš Forman’s A Blonde in Love and Jan Němec’s The Party and the Guests. Němec’s film is a good comparison point, as well as another of Forman’s films – not A Blonde in Love, but The Firemen’s Ball. Like those films, Larks on a String focuses intently on a strange space, one where the ordinary rules of polite society appear to have been suspended. It’s not as farcical as The Firemen’s Ball, nor as surreal as The Party and the Guests, but it has a visual precision, a deep weirdness and a piercing political intelligence that reminds you how extraordinarily talented this generation of Czech and Slovak directors were.

In Larks on a String, the space is a scrapyard, where a group of dissidents have been exiled so they can be re-educated through manual labour. The core concept is blood-chilling, but from the very start Menzel is alert to the absurdities in the system; one of the thought criminals is being punished for playing the saxophone, which has been classified as a bourgeois instrument. Indeed, the prisoners’ clearly differentiated personalities, a tendency towards insubordination and childish nicknames – the saxophonist is called Saxophone, and most of the other characters’ handles are similarly related to their ‘offences’ – put you in mind of a juvenile Hollywood comedy in the Little Rascals vein, rather than a searing drama about dictatorship.

That’s not to say that Menzel ducks the darkness at the film’s heart. His best-known film, Closely Observed Trains, takes place during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia (like Larks on a String, it is based on the writing of Bohumil Hrabal). The tone of Closely Observed Trains is surprisingly breezy, evidencing Menzel’s deeply held belief that love, lust and mischief will inevitably triumph over repression. But when its young hero finds himself in conflict with the regime, Menzel is coldly honest about his chances of victory. Larks on a String has plenty of interludes that recall the impish, romantic sensibility of Closely Observed Trains; there’s a raucous Roma wedding where the bride is doused with red wine, and one young man manages to secretly flirt with a girl by reflecting sunlight at her with a hand-mirror. The difference is that, in Closely Observed Trains, scenes like this set the tone for most of the movie. In Larks on a String, they’re just snatched moments of pleasure – easy to enjoy, certainly, but precious in how transparently fragile such happiness is in a world like this.

In Closely Observed Trains, Menzel could give his anarchic comic sensibility free reign because he was dealing with a vanquished regime. Larks on a String deals directly with the reality of Czechoslovakia under Communism, and it’s no surprise that the government didn’t see the funny side. Not least because, in the casting of Rudolf Hrušinský as the official tasked with overseeing the rowdy dissidents, Menzel appears to be drawing a truly daring parallel between the villains of these two films. Hrušinský may be playing a Communist here, but he is most famous as the anti-hero of Juraj Herz’s extraordinarily frightening The Cremator, where he played a bland suburban man who ends up operating the crematorium ovens in a Nazi extermination camp. His low-level functionary in Larks on a String doesn’t have that kind of power, but the film makes similarly memorable use of this great actor’s gift for avuncular, smiling menace.

There are two key reasons to choose this Blu-Ray over the original DVD release, the first of which is that the picture quality is superb. Menzel’s cinematographer Jaromír Šofr pulls off the beguiling trick of making the huge pile of scrap the story takes place seem threatening and weirdly inviting in its chaotic accumulation of bric-a-brac, and Blu-Ray allows you to fully appreciate this. The second is the extras. Everything from the initial DVD release has been imported, including the booklet essays by Šofr and Czech and Slovak cinema expert Peter Hames, and an archive interview with Menzel. But a lot has happened in Jiří Menzel scholarship since then, not least the release of Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s enormous biographical documentary CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel. As a result, there’s a typically illuminating conversation between Dungarpur and Menzel on the disc, as well as Menzel’s student short Our Mr. Foerster Died and a new commentary from Mike White and Jonathan Owen.

Larks on a String (1969)