• The Ear (Ucho)

8/21/23 (Mon)

Karel Kachyňa’s 1970 work, co-written by him with his long-time activist screen partner Jan Procházka based on the latter’s story, came at the wrong end of the Soviet invasion that put a halt to the Prague Spring and, consequently, to the subversive films of the Czech New Wave. Procházka’s good relations with the president were no help in preventing this film from being banned even before its release. It did not appear in public until 1989; it was entered into competition for a Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival the next year.

A bickering couple right out of Virginia Woolf, here the deputy minister of construction and his floozy wife, return from a party function late at night to find strange happenings at their home. The front gate is unlocked, the spare keys are missing, and the power is shut off. The husband figures their son must have been playing around, but learns that the kid was locked in his room all night; he suspects that there’s been a general power outage, but the neighbors lights are on; the phone is dead; and he spots people in their garden as well as a car parked ominously nearby. He learns indirectly at the event that his boss (who has a Jewish name) and certain colleagues have been arrested, and becomes paranoid that he is next. In repeated flashbacks, he thinks back on the conversations at the event and tries to piece together random comments to suss out their meaning. Having participated in a decision against a certain company, he searches for a briefcase with incriminating evidence but, unable to find it, is convinced that it has been removed. He throws documents into the toilet and sets them on fire to flush them away (burning the toilet in the process); when the wife opens the window to let out the smoke, he angrily slams it shut, afraid that this will expose them to the people that he is convinced are watching them. He is terrified when, after the power is restored, he is visited by his colleagues in the middle of the night, then relieved when it seems that they have come just to continue their drinking. It is only after they leave that he discovers tiny listening devices, which the wife calls “the ears”, all around the house, including areas like the bathroom that were previously safe spaces. He feels his world closing in on him.

Meanwhile, the outspoken wife is plastered after the event and none too happy that the husband has forgotten their 10th anniversary. She starts to pee outside the gate, then, to her husband’s horror, speaks loudly and indiscreetly outside their safe (i.e., un-bugged) areas. She is more concerned with the food in the unplugged refrigerator, and berates her husband’s constant neglect of her versus his hysterical concern over his job. The dirty dishes and disheveled space reflect her state of mind. She looks down on her husband for his willingness to play along with the drunken colleagues to save his own skin, and is incensed when he gives them the anniversary cake. It’s only when she discovers the “ears” scattered around the home that she takes his ramblings more seriously, and responds frantically when he locks himself into a room with the intention of killing himself, crying that she will go with him. It turns out that the intruders have taken the gun – “When they want to do it,” he muses drily, “they do it themselves.”

In the end, their electricity restored, they receive a phone call at 5:00am. In a wonderfully tense scene, the couple fearfully approach the phone and pick up the receiver. They learn that the husband has in fact been promoted to minister. As they sit outside taking it all in, the wife declares in the film’s final line, “I’m scared.”

A scathing look at the paranoiac state of society under totalitarianism. It’s impressive that the film, though immediately prohibited from release, could be made at all in Communist Czechoslovakia; Procházka had built a personal relationship with the nation’s president after being mistaken for a different Procházka (long story) and had tested the waters with earlier films, but this was apparently a step too far. The husband in the film has plentiful reason to be suspicious – being paranoid doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to be paranoid about – and the system, for all its praise of equality for all, has left an empty every-man-for-himself attitude in its stead. The husband is unable to trust his own peers or take anything at face value, and demonstrates pretty clearly that he himself would not let morals stand in the way of sheer survival in the system. The quarreling couple ultimately find commonality in knowing that they have only each other in the end.

The action is compressed over a single claustrophobic night. The air of menace in the candlelit scenes at home offer a stark contrast with the intense lighting in the expressionistic party scenes showing the people wildly dancing and laughing. The memories of the party are brilliantly woven into the story as the man struggles to parse even the vaguest bits of conversation, like whether a party official called his wife by her name. The director films them speaking directly to the camera, placing us unsettlingly in the husband’s shoes. The tension is heightened by the caustic relationship of the couple, especially the bitter asides of the wife.

Radoslav Brzobohatý and especially Jiřina Bohdalová as husband and wife are perfection. The multi-level story of marital discord and political tensions is compelling, and the director has structured it beautifully.. With the action other than recollections of the party event mainly confined to the house, I’m surprised it hasn’t been adapted for the stage. Highly recommended.