The Firemen’s Ball (1967) A good fun satire on totalitarianism? (Review)

If you’re intrigued by the current cinephile chatter about the Czechoslovak New Wave and you’re looking for a good place to start, you couldn’t do much better than Arrow’s new reissue of Miloš Forman’s second film. The Firemen’s Ball is as formally precise and tightly edited as any film in the whole movement, yet its sense of humour is less of an acquired taste. In place of the alienating absurdity of a film like Daisies or Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, The Firemen’s Ball offers a droll satire of the pettiness and greed that comes with even a minor position of authority. After the film was banned, Forman famously ended up in Hollywood, directing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus, among many others. Had he emigrated a decade or two early, the sensibility on display in this film might have found a comfortable berth at Ealing.

In the disc’s extras, Forman and his co-writer Ivan Passer (also a notable director in his own right – the Czechoslovak New Wave was nothing if not collaborative) discuss the odd circumstances that led to the film being made. During the research process for another, unmade, film, they stumbled across a ball for the firemen of the village they were staying in. They found the situation so promising that they scrapped the script they were working on and set to work on another film, a comedy almost totally eschewing professional actors in favour of the local firemen – playing local firemen.

Although the film is a farce about an ineptly organised social event, this casting choice makes it unwise to view the film as simple entertainment. Unfortunately, the people who read deeper political meanings into the film included the Soviet government, who ordered that the film be banned “forever” when they invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968. Yet The Firemen’s Ball is not solely a criticism of totalitarianism. Its comedy is applicable to all kinds of systems, so much so that a key phrase from the third act (“zhastnout”, literally “to turn the lights out”) became a slang term during the 1990s for the asset-stripping privatisation that followed the collapse of Communism.

That said, while Forman doesn’t reject the political readings of the film (these days – he was forced to officially disavow them during the Soviet occupation), he says it wasn’t his intention to make a statement. The tone darkens a little in the second half, but for its first half The Firemen’s Ball is simply good fun. It shows Forman, his cast and crew marshalling modes of comedy from slapstick to slow-burn into one perfectly orchestrated ensemble piece. Forman’s regular cinematographer, the recently deceased Miroslav Ondříček, makes great sport of shooting and lighting the wrinkled faces of the Dad’s Army of firemen Forman made movie stars, and Arrow’s typically excellent restoration is a timely tribute to his work.

As for the extras, they’re lighter than some of Arrow’s comprehensive recent sets but still worth pursuing, with the two half-hour films by Czech cinema expert Michael Brooke particularly useful. One is an oddly touching look at some of the non-professional actors who featured in films by Forman and his contemporaries, the other is a personal response to the main feature and its themes. Brooke’s intriguing reading is that The Firemen’s Ball is a film about performance, from the commemorative celebration the ball is built around to the girls auditioning for the firemen’s somewhat questionable beauty pageant, to the non-professional actors playing hopefully less competent versions of themselves. Examined in this light, maybe Forman’s most personal American film is not either of his Best Picture winners but Man on the Moon, a tender biopic of a performer who always wanted to leave the audience wondering if he was performing or not.

Thanks for reading our review of The Firemen’s Ball

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