Closely Watched Trains

A jewel of the Czechoslovak New Wave, Jiří Menzel's Closely Watched Trains (1966) 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's close involvement, it was Menzel's first feature and remains his most celebrated.

Václav Neckář plays Miloš, the bashful young apprentice at a sleepy rural railway station whose fumbling pursuit of manhood unfolds against the backdrop of the Nazi occupation. Menzel's touch is gentle and wry, attentive 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 — even as the war's gravity gathers steadily at the edges of the frame. The comedy is bittersweet, the eroticism tender rather than coarse.

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