Capricious Summer

Is the arrival of a cinematic New Wave first detected at a film festival? There are few earlier places for the public to notice – between the breaks, curves, and depths – the ripple beneath the surface of the status quo. In the 1960s, the Czech New Wave carved around Cannes, New York, Melbourne, and the festivals in between. On the scale, Jiří Menzel’s Ostře sledované vlaky (Closely Observed Trains, 1966) emerged as the powerful, perfect break that submerged the scene in Czech cinema. In 1968, Closely Observed Trains won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Menzel, who had just turned 30, accepted the award in person. “I am very happy Americans like Czech films,” he said with polite conviction. ¹ There are few moments in Czech cinema that have produced international recognition of comparable size.

After he won his Academy Award, Menzel – still 30 – arrived at the 21st Festival de Cannes with his sophomore feature, Rozmarné léto (Capricious Summer, 1968), to compete in the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film. Miloš Forman’s Hoří, má panenko (The Firemen’s Ball, 1967) and Jan Němec’s O slavnosti a hostech (A Report on the Party and Guests, 1966) were contenders, too. By the ninth day of the festival, however, Cannes was cancelled. Over the previous week, as civil protests intensified across France, the festival grew into a site of conflict. Filmmakers declared solidarity with the workers’ and students’ revolt, and many drove their anger against the Culture Minister Andre Malraux, who had fired Henri Langlois, the esteemed head of the Cinémathèque Française. ² Filmmakers withdrew their work, critics resigned, and the Cannes director Robert Favre Le Bret announced the festival’s cancellation. Strangely, the festival screened Carlos Saura’s Peppermint Frappé (1967) before its official shutdown, and when it played, or, more specifically, as the screen curtains began to rise, Saura, and Geraldine Chaplin (the protagonist of the film and Saura’s girlfriend at the time) rushed on stage, and with the added weight (literally) of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, hung on from the curtains. A battered competition without any prizes, eleven of the twenty-eight films held their premieres at the festival, including the two by Forman and Němec. But a world premiere status remained intact for Capricious Summer.  

A month later, Capricious Summer received its premiere at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival and there it won the Crystal Globe. Menzel “hesitantly accepted” the award, film historian and journalist Jindřiška Bláhová said:

He was not very happy about it. He came but was kind of sour about it. For Věra Chytilová or Miloš Forman or Jiří Menzel, it was much more prestigious to show their movies in the West.

Then, on a September evening of the same year, Capricious Summer opened the 6th New York Film Festival. Menzel and actor Jitka Bendová were attendees. The festival presented Forman’s The Fireman’s Ball in its Closing Night slot; Forman’s fifth feature then competed for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 41st Academy Awards. This was not the Czech New Wave’s first foray into the New York festival scene. In addition to other screenings, the New York Film Festival offered a notable serve of four Czechoslovakian films in their 1966 program, including Menzel’s short Smrt pana Baltazara (The Death of Mr Balthazar, 1965), his story in the anthology film Perličky na dně (Pearls of the Deep, Jiří Menzel, Jan Němec, Evald Schorm, Věra Chytilová, Jaromil Jireš, 1965). 

In late September, days after its American premiere, Capricious Summer competed in the 11th Locarno Film Festival. The month earlier, in the depths of summer,  250,000 Soviet, Polish, Bulgarian and Hungaraian troops and 2,000 tanks invaded Czechoslovakia. Ultimately, Menzel refused to allow himself to serve on the festival’s jury, which was judging Soviet, East German and Hungarian films for the Golden Leopard.

When Capricious Summer reached Australia in 1969, it appeared at the Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals. “A complete change of pace and mood from last year’s Closely [Observed] Trains,” a critic of the Canberra Times noted, “a Renoir salad, spiced with Czech vinegar.”⁴

Capricious Summer was one of three stories by Vladislav Vančura that Menzel adapted. It was the first, and the filmmaker initially rejected it. To use his words from the remarkable seven-hour documentary CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel (Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, 2018):

When they came to me with the script, I sent them to hell. You can only ruin that by making a movie. Vančura’s text is exquisite, it’s like a poem. Adding pictures can only ruin it. A few days later I met Jaromír Šofr, a cameraman, we made Trains together… The regular salary we had was very low. The same department store cashiers had. I just told him I just turned one movie down. So Šofr made me call the writer to see if it was still available – it was. So I started filming Capricious Summer.

In 2006, the original Rozmarné léto – the 1926 novel by Vančura – was translated into English and titled Summer of Caprice. In an interview from that year, Mark Corner, the English translator of the novel, described the story on Radio Prague International as “about a summer in which there is very little but rain, though the sky occasionally clears at night.” He said:

The book centres around three eccentric characters – a major, a canon and someone I translate variously as a bathing superintendent. He’s basically someone who looks after the local swimming pool on the edge of the river.⁵

If Rozmarné léto was considered unadaptable, it was also thought to be untranslatable. A novella broken into over fifty sections, Corner described the book’s complex structure as “fifty separate scenes in a film, which are brought together in the atmosphere they create.”⁶ Within the dimensions of Vančura’s original text, Menzel’s 74-minute adaptation supported the writer’s poetic frame. In the film, as in the book, there is a sense of the provincial, of time lost, of romance, and a fresh taste of wine and the lazy streams of summer. The film, held by the nostalgia and atmosphere of the book, blooms in the warm Czech countryside.  

Each year the willows get out of hand, preserving an unmanicured appearance that almost exceeds the bounds of decency. No one trims them and for those who make their way to the river there is nothing but a smattering of footpaths which are, alas, narrow. At the beginning of each pathway an inscription has been fixed to an indifferently painted pole, which carries its message rather as a female donkey carries her saddle. The announcement reads: River Resort.⁷

In spite of the poetic dimension of the story, Menzel was unapologetically realistic as a filmmaker, seeing his job as a trade rather than an art form:

I am weird. For me, it isn’t about being inspired by something or feeling the need to do something. I get a job to do just like a joiner is asked to make a table. He gets an order and makes a table. My only advantage is that I get to choose which table I want to make and if I want to make it at all. But afterwards, you shouldn’t see it as anything divine.⁸

Even then, those who watch Capricious Summer may feel inspired by its poetry. Menzel ultimately envisions a past of leisurely days, and released it in a year in which the shadow of social instability and fragmentation was all-encompassing. In other words, the film appears as a freshly light ripple in the too-short-lived experimentation of the Czech New Wave.

Rozmarné léto/Capricious Summer (1968 Czechoslovakia 74 mins)

Prod Co: Filmové studio Barrandov Dir: Jiří Menzel Scr: Vladimír Kalina, Jan Libora, Jiří Menzel, Václav Nývlt, based on the novel by Vladislav Vančura Ed: Jiřina Lukešová Phot: Jaromír Šofr Prod Des: Oldrich Bosák Cos Des: Olga Dimitrovová Mus: Jirí Šust

Cast: Rudolf Hrušínský, Vlastimil Brodský, František Řehák, Míla Myslíková, Jana Preissová, Jiří Menzel, Bohuš Záhorský

Endnotes