Capricious Summer (1968)
Middle-aged Antonin and his friends, the major, now retired, and the canon, are in the river, swimming and philosophizing. Then it starts to rain. It just seems to be that sort of summer. Antonin runs the swimming bath with his portly wife Katherine... A man appears with his horse-drawn caravan. He lays a striped pole across the river and walks over. With a handstand and a magic trick, Ernie the Conjuror invites everyone to that evening's performance... Ernie is a tightrope walker of only modest skill, but with a slim and beautiful assistant, Anna. Antonin speaks to her. The two spend the night in the change room by the river, Antonin massaging her feet all night long. Katherine decides to move into the caravan with Ernie. But now the major and even the canon sense Anna's attractiveness...
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Most of the Czech films I've seen follow a familiar pattern: a history lesson revolving around war or occupation, along with lots of bohemian irony and iconic images, usually of Prague. This one's different. I enjoyed Kolya, and Menzel's other films (Closely Watched Trains and I Served the King of England), but I prefer this one for leaving out the pathos.The irony would come through more clearly if I spoke any Czech beyond "dobre den", but this film still has plenty. A tattered little town with unpaved streets, drenched by miserable summer rain the whole way through. A visit by a fleabag circus supplies a limited amount of merriment - about what the little town deserves. About all they've come to expect, too, in their sodden little corner of Bohemia.I wouldn't have watched this film at all if I hadn't already "read" the book. Josef Capek's witty illustrations for the novel led me to a movie which is every bit as good, and which fills in the details I couldn't read between the pictures.
Like CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS, CAPRICIOUS SUMMER is essentially a sexcapade... but without the political backdrop of a World War. While I much prefer the absolute beauty of the black and white images captured in CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS (would-be cinematographers, please take note), CAPRICIOUS SUMMER boasts beautiful imagery of its own. The director's eye for composition is impeccable. His own turn, as the acrobat tightroping his way through an elicit affair, is as much fun to watch as Chaplin or Polanski or Woody Allen. (One can't help but feel for the guy when we see him, shoulders slumped, sitting in the doorway of his travelling gypsy wagon listening to his "new love" as she plucks a chicken for dinner. He is enduring what the woman's husband had had to endure for years, and it ain't a whole lotta fun...) Very taut direction; like walking a tightrope, every move exact.
Pretty good-looking, very good music, erotic, relaxed, and poetic and philosophic in a pretty similar way to Godard's films from the 90ies. Unfortunately, people who do not speak Czech will probably miss many points of the dialogue.8 out of 10.
A sleepy spa village is excited when visited by a circus acrobat and his beautiful assistant.Oddly amusing little comedy whose main virtue is its inimitable period setting and somewhat chekhovian atmosphere; though the wayward eccentricity of its characters is also something to experience.