A new Second Run disc is always an education, and this time it’s taught me what the genre term is for those strange, high-concept Czechoslovak comedies like Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself With Tea, or Happy End. In their native country, they’re called “crazy comedies”. That name might betray a certain lack of imagination, but happily you could never level the same charge at the films themselves. These are extraordinary fusions of science fiction and farce, embracing the kind of big ideas that fuel serious speculative fiction and playing them for absurd belly-laughs. Second Run’s latest release, Václav Vorliček’s Who Wants to Kill Jessie?, is as strong an example of this style as you could ask for.
Who Wants to Kill Jessie? begins as a kind of sci-fi take on the workplace comedy. Jiří Sovák, who essayed a great comic villain as the fanatical Nazi Klaus Abard in Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up…, shows a completely different side to his comic abilities as Jindrich, the hapless husband of Dana Medřická’s genius inventor Ruzenka. He’s stuck lecturing bored students, but he has a dream of outshining his wife by creating working anti-gravity gloves. Confiscating one of his students’ superhero comics – such entertainments were then hard to get hold of in then-Communist Czechoslovakia – he notices that the heroine Jessie has a pair of the exact gloves he wishes to invent. From then on, his dreams are filled with the buxom blonde adventuress, played by Olga Schoberová (who had previously co-starred with Medřická in one of the great ‘serious’ Czechoslovak SF films, Jindřich Polák’s Ikarie XB-1).
This wouldn’t be a problem, were it not for the fact that – and you may struggle to predict where this is going – Ruzenka has invented a serum that can replace people’s bad dreams with happier ones. Unfortunately, this comes with a serious side-effect. The bad dreams then escape into the real world, which is annoying but harmless when Ruzenka is treating a cow plagued by a recurrent nightmare about flies. When she applies it to her husband, it means Jessie is soon running around in the real world, completely three-dimensional but only able to talk in huge, floating speech bubbles. Worse, two of her rogue’s gallery have escaped Jindrich’s dreams as well, and they’re trashing the couple’s apartment…
It’s easy to work out what a modern superhero spoof might be parodying, but what is the target of Vorliček’s film? The temptation, particularly when you see the speech bubbles, is to read it as a response to the Adam West Batman – but that serial started airing in the same year Who Wants to Kill Jessie? was released, and in any case it wouldn’t have been on any Eastern Bloc TV channels. The simple truth is that Vorliček and his art director Kája Saudek were comic-strip fans, and their parody is broad enough to be funny and specific enough to convince. The sketching-in of Jessie’s world is as convincing as the fictional comic strips in Michael Chabon’s modern classic novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Jessie herself is a visual clone of Jean-Claude Forest’s Barbarella, with a William Moulton Marston character’s knack for getting tied up. Her two main enemies suggest her strip has been long-running enough to absorb the influence of many different eras of comic book history; one is a giggling cowboy, the other is actually credited in promotional materials (though not on-screen) as Superman!
In an excellent special feature on the history of the “crazy comedies”, Michael Brooke notes that their critical reputation has always been held down by the fact that they achieved peak popularity after the Soviet invasion and “normalisation” of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The assumption is that they must be unchallenging, escapist entertainment, but while it’s true that Who Wants to Kill Jessie? isn’t as hard-hitting as Czechoslovak New Wave classics like The Ear or All My Good Countrymen, it’s surprisingly complex in its politics. The choice of two archetypal American action heroes as the villains obviously implies an anti-capitalist, anti-American attitude, yet equally the film is a love letter to a medium that was officially considered capitalist trash in the Eastern Bloc countries.
There’s also the matter of Ruzenka’s machine for replacing bad dreams with happy ones, something which can easily be read as a satire on Communist re-education programmes. Indeed, Ruzenka’s first plan for dealing with the rampaging cartoon characters is to kill them, but she changes tactics when a fellow worker reminds her that, as good Czech citizens, they’re supposed to believe that anybody can be re-educated. Ruzenka’s dream-altering serum is presented as a major breakthrough, but the dream-monitoring machine she uses to check its success is a fait accompli that nobody regards as outlandish. Nobody, in Who Wants to Kill Jessie?‘s funhouse-mirror Czechoslovakia, seems to consider it strange that government scientists can monitor their dreams.
Jonathan Owen’s extremely thorough, affectionate booklet notes that Medřická picked up on this subtext immediately, asking Vorliček if he was asking her to “play the Communist Party”. Without this context, Ruzenka’s treatment can come across as the film’s lone sour note. Medřická’s performance is just so good – her subtle annoyance when she first sees Jessie in her husband’s dreams is hilarious – that it’s a shame she’s reduced first to an antagonist, then to a stereotypical shrew. With the above context, the whole film becomes a successful allegory for the triumph of imagination over bureaucracy, and more importantly it’s incredibly funny. An early image of the happy dream Ruzenka creates for the fly-fearing cow is the funniest single shot I’ve seen in years, and Juraj Višný deserves credit for somehow managing to play an evil, rampaging Superman with deadpan comic understatement.
The whole film pulls off a similar balancing act between silliness and deadpan. As with his most famous film, the Christmas classic Three Wishes for Cinderella, Vorliček is uncannily good at creating a grounded, believable context for high fantasy without sucking the fun out of it. The film’s black-and-white cinematography was forced on him when the producers warned him some of his effects would be too expensive in colour, but it turns out to be a masterstroke: both the drab, grey real world and the stark ink lines of the cartoon are perfect for monochrome. Extras, apart from the outstanding work by Michael Brooke and Jonathan Owen noted above, include Vorliček’s accomplished student short Directive.
WHO WANTS TO KILL JESSIE? IS OUT NOW ON SECOND RUN BLU-RAY
