I wasn’t prepared for quite how weird this is. Do I like it? No, that I can’t say. I can just say it’s so, so strange. In that I am completely secure. I did enjoy the last story. It was still somewhat weird, but it was sweet.

czechoslovakia, 1966, czech

JIŘÍ MENZEL, VĚRA CHYTILOVÁ, JAROMIL JIREŠ, JAN NĚMEC, EVALD SCHORM


Pearls of the Deep

I’ve mentioned this many times before, but it bears repeating; I am, generally speaking, not a fan of allegory. I never know what the author means, and I don’t really like trying to guess. As with anything, there are exceptions, but at best allegory works for me if the thing itself is entertaining or meaningful on its own merits. If I have to understand a deeper hidden meaning to get anything, it’s almost certainly going to be a miss for me.

I don’t think you need to understand any deep meaning to enjoy this, but I don’t really know. I don’t know, because I didn’t enjoy it, regardless of whether I understood it or not. This is five separate anthology pieces, and at best I enjoyed two of them. Really, I found one amusing and another sweet. I was not grabbed by any of these.

I don’t know if that’s because I was not living in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s. There was something happening there then, and the cinema was blossoming in very interesting ways. I just don’t think I’m tuned properly to get anything out of those waves. At least not when they are this faint. With Daisies, I could enjoy the spectacle if nothing else. Oh well, maybe I’ll try this again once I’ve immersed myself in more of the other films from this place and era. Maybe then I’ll find something for me.