Closely Watched Trains

Jiří Menzel's Closely Watched Trains (1966), a jewel of the Czechoslovak New Wave, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and announced a director who could hold tragedy and comedy in a single, delicate balance. Adapted from Bohumil Hrabal's novel with the author closely involved, it was Menzel's first feature and is still his most celebrated.

Václav Neckář plays Miloš, the bashful young apprentice at a sleepy rural railway station whose fumbling pursuit of manhood plays out against the Nazi occupation. Menzel's touch is gentle and wry, alert to small human absurdities: a lecherous senior dispatcher, a station-master obsessed with his pigeons, a notorious episode involving a young woman and a set of official rubber stamps. All the while, the weight of the war gathers at the edges of the frame. The comedy is bittersweet, and the eroticism is tender, never coarse.

Made during the cultural opening that came before the Prague Spring, the film caught a national voice that the Soviet crackdown would soon silence, and it remains a high point of one of cinema's great regional movements. Humane, funny and heartbreaking by turns, it finds in one shy young man's small life a reflection of an entire occupied country, and it earns its emotional turns with a lightness that very few films about the war have ever matched.