Karel Kachyňa can be a hard director to pin down, which is probably for the best considering that, for a lot of his career, Czechoslovakia’s intelligence agencies were trying to do just that. Like a surprising amount of the country’s best directors, he did not flee after the Soviet invasion of 1968, so the stages of his career were shaped more by political restrictions than artistic development. Exiles like Miloš Forman enjoyed more freedom to explore personal themes; as such, it’s quite easy to draw a straight line from the rebellious heroes of Forman’s early Czech films like Black Peter through to Hollywood triumphs like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Man on the Moon. But for a long time, all the information Western cinephiles had about Kachyňa was contradictory. On the one hand, during the Soviet occupation he made a series of charming, cosy children’s films including a celebrated version of The Little Mermaid. Before that, though, he made The Ear, a sweat-soaked drama of state surveillance that could not be legally shown until after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Clearly, auteur theorists will have their work cut out making a case for these films being part of the same vision.
One of the remarkable things about Long Live the Republic!, newly released on Blu-Ray by Second Run, is that it successfully proves that the man who made The Ear and the man who made The Little Mermaid as one and the same. It also opens a window onto a different phase in Kachyňa’s career, one which Second Run has previously explored in their 2022 release of Coach to Vienna, the film Kachyňa made directly after this one. Before the family movies, before The Ear, Karel Kachyňa was a fearless director of coruscating war movies and social satires, their passage through the censors’ boards eased by his close working relationship with the author and Communist Party loyalist Jan Procházka.
An autobiographical novel inspired by Procházka’s childhood in Nazi-controlled Czechoslovakia, Long Live the Republic! was always destined to become a Karel Kachyňa film – the writer even dedicated the book to Kachyňa, “for whose sensitive directorial talents it was intended”. Czechoslovak war films don’t always have the same lofty reputation as the rest of the former nation’s cinema; it wasn’t until Second Run’s reissue of his monumental Witchhammer that Otakar Vávra’s reputation escaped the stain of the propagandistic WWII flag-wavers he made in the 1970s. But the mid-’60s was a very different era in Czechoslovak cinema. Rather than a morally simplistic effort to remind the battered nation who liberated them from the Nazis, Long Live the Republic! takes on some thorny, morally complex memories. And it does it all from the viewpoint of a child, a child imaginative enough to make this the unlikely missing link between Kachyňa’s politically searing early films and his later children’s movies.
The result is closer to a Czech Fellini, an audacious jumble of dreams and memories with a killer punch underneath the whimsy.
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Presenting the horrors of war through a child’s perspective is a popular cinematic device, for a number of different reasons. It can be a way of softening the horror, or it can be a way of confronting it. It can result in a near-unwatchably harrowing film like Come and See, or it could be Jojo Rabbit. Long Live the Republic! finds its own, deeply unique, reason for choosing a child protagonist. For 12-year-old Oldřich, played superbly by Zdeněk Lstibůrek, the Second World War is a nuisance, but the violence he suffers at the hands of local bullies and adult authorities is very real. There’s not much wartime violence in Long Live the Republic!, at least not in the bomb-bursting, machine-gun-firing manner of most war films. But there is violence, most of it aimed at Oldřich. To the child, it scarcely matters if the people beating him up and stealing from him are his fellow children or German soldiers. The audience definitely notice.
Kachyňa and Procházka turn Oldřich’s indifference to the politics of the war around him into remarkable, subversive storytelling. Rather than the glorious liberators that the Red Army would be depicted as in later Czechoslovak films, the defeat of the Nazis in Long Live the Republic! holds true to Procházka’s memory of the event as nothing more glorious than one worn-out, ragged, exhausted group of soldiers replaced with another. It’s not anti-Communist – indeed, Peter Hames’s booklet ends by explaining that Kachyňa and Procházka approached the Communist system in the spirit of comradely critique, fuelled by the hope that it could live up to its revolutionary principles. It even features probably the jolliest Red Army soldier in cinematic history, in a scene where Oldřich runs from machine-gun fire in a cornfield. But this is not the kind of film that would be permissible in Czechoslovakia after the 1968 invasion.
Or is it? The most unexpected and charming thing about Long Live the Republic! is that it has an extremely strong streak of fantasy, one which bridges the gap between the early and later stages of Kachyňa’s career. The spine of the narrative is based around Oldřich’s quest to find his beloved horse, a theme which Kachyňa would revisit in more family-oriented takes on the kid-and-animal relationship like I’m Jumping Over Puddles Again. The film frequently ventures unannounced into Oldřich’s fantasies, which range from the grand fantasy of riding a flying horse to the cartoon slapstick of pushing one of his bullies off a building and watching him embed himself upside-down up to the waist in the ground, legs kicking helplessly. Whatever the politics of Procházka’s novel, the authorities clearly felt this could be a prestige literary adaptation worth allotting plenty of resources to. Did they expect a more conventional war-movie spectacle? The result is closer to a Czech Fellini, an audacious jumble of dreams and memories with a killer punch underneath the whimsy.
As mentioned, there’s a very fine booklet from one of the foremost English-speaking experts on Czechoslovak film, Peter Hames, which is extremely useful in contextualising the film as part of Kachyňa’s early career. There is also a 1998 interview with the director, and a short film from one of his peers, Jan Němec. The year before Long Live the Republic! was released, Němec made his own war film, Diamonds of the Night, which is as spare and tense as Long Live the Republic! is sprawling and lavish. Yet Němec’s 1963 short documentary A Memory for the Present pairs surprisingly well with Kachyňa’s film, taking a very different approach towards the central issue of how to remember World War II. The disc is based on a new HD transfer which does justice to the deep shadows and crisp highlights of Jaromír Šofr’s cinematography.
LONG LIVE THE REPUBLIC! IS OUT NOW ON SECOND RUN BLU-RAY
