the horror of celebration
Miloš Forman, Ivan
Passer, and Jaroslav Papoušek (screenplay), Miloš Forman (director) Hoří, má panenko (The Fireman’s Ball) / 1967
This
year, on April 13, the Czech-born film director, Miloš Forman died. I’d seen
several of his American-produced films—after the post “Prague-spring” crackdown
he determined to stay in France and, later the US—including One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (which I
quite enjoyed) and Amadeus (of which
I am not as fond). I determined, however, in celebration of the filmmaker to
focus on his last Czech film, The Fireman’s
Ball, a hilarious satire that, without actually being structured as an
allegory of Czech Communism, nonetheless speaks volumes for the ideals and,
most importantly, the general cynicism of the society.
At the center of this comic masterwork is
the Retired Fire Chief (Jan Stöckl), who at 85 is now suffering from
cancer—although the volunteer firemen working under him are not certain he
knows of his diagnosis, since current doctors refuse to tell their patients the
worse new about their health (much, one supposes, like the politicians who run
the government). Nonetheless, a group titled “The Committee,” (headed by
Jan Vostrcil) determine to
celebrate their former leader in a big way, including a grand dance replete
with a lottery of foods and smaller trinkets—perhaps as a way of paying for the
event—as well as a beauty pageant. They also have purchased a ceremonial fire
axe brandishing a special commentary of praise to the retiree.
Even in the film’s very first scenes we suspect that this seemingly joyful tribute might very wall end badly, given the fact that, like the school-board members of Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, these provincials cannot agree on anything, and have no potential to become a barbershop quartet. And indeed, once they have agreed to never mention their former head’s illness to him and that they will all work together to make the best celebration possible, they move, more and more quickly, into choppy waters.
For, from that moment everything begins to
go wrong. While creating a banner for the event, the artist, using a flame to
char the banner’s edges, presumably to suggest their vocation, falls from a
high ladder, while a small fire consumes his art. Another committee member
perceives that some of the consumables laid out on the lottery table are now missing,
a bottle of wine and, later, a large piece of headcheese (which he ultimately discovers
in his wife’s purse).
As the large audience begins to dance
some of the younger women and men get more and more inebriated, resulting in
under-table sexual events and numerous other pratfall situations, including a
kind of banana-peel incident when one of the women loses all her fake pearls,
one by one.
The Committee members begin to go on a
hunt to find eight women for their beauty pageant, some preferring to explore
legs and faces from deep within the crowd, while others take to the balcony to
spot the women dancers’ bosoms. But, in the end, they find it difficult to find
even eight beauties, while fathers and mothers attempt to intercede on their
choices, insisting their own 
daughters be included. When they do find at least
8 women, the girls seem quite plain and truly awkward in even having been chosen.
Only one, who is late because she has gone home to get her bathing suit (about
which nothing has previously been said), has any panache, as the elderly
fireman ogle her, finally locking the door to protect their activities.
When they do finally attempt to parade
the women before the crowd, the shy local girls rush away from the supposed
festivities, locking themselves in an upstairs bathroom, embarrassed now by
their sudden if momentary celebrity.
Fed up with the chaos, the dancers
themselves begin to nominate their own companions, bringing them forward in
chairs and arms, while the women cry out in distress. A real fire, fortuitously,
interrupts events as the firemen and the entire audience rushes out to the
house of an old man, whose large home is already burning beyond control. Only a
few pieces of furniture and the old man himself is saved.
In sympathy to what has happened to the
man, the crowd returns with him to the ball, giving up all their lottery
numbers so that he may have first choice. By that time, however, the Committee discovers
that almost everything upon their table has been stolen. They offer the
possibility that they will briefly turn off the lights so that people may
return what they have illegally taken, but no one except the Committee member
whose wife has stolen the headcheese returns it, caught unfortunately when the
lights go up again.
When they finally attempt to award their
former chief their ceremonial hatchet, they open the box to discover that it
too has been stolen!
One can easily comprehend how such a
dark satiric message suggesting that nearly everyone in this small community is
corrupt, despite at a few moments of meaning well, would not go down well in
Forman’s home country. And several small-town Czech firemen strongly protested
the film’s presentation of their kind. When the new Czech freedoms were
squelched, Forman’s film was banned “forever.” Presumably the Czechs can now
show this film, particularly after the film’s nomination for the 1967 Academy
Award for best Foreign Film. But I might imagine that its darkly cynical view
of his countrymen still rankles some sensibilities.
The only moment that this small
community actually come together with a sense of communal purpose is during the
great fire, but even here we suspect it is more for the spectacle of the event
than for any empathetic concern—although some do encourage the fireman to turn
the old man away from his view of the fire now destroying his entire life. And
once the event is over, as we see, they are perfectly ready to leave the now
homeless and fortuneless man with nothing. Forman, in a surrealist scene, shows
the old man returning to his bed, now sitting in a snow-filled field near the
desolation of his former house. Already another man lies in the bed, which he
is simply now forced to share with the intruder.
In a world of even best intentions, as
Forman has written, nothing can work out when the leaders attempt to import
their own shared notions of what is right: “That's a problem of all
governments, of all committees, including firemen's committees. That they try
and they pretend and they announce that they are preparing a happy, gay,
amusing evening or life for the people. And everybody has the best
intentions... But suddenly things turn out in such a catastrophic way that, for
me, this is a vision of what's going on today in the world.” As Forman’s
contempoary, Jan
Němec, has shown us in one of
his own films, even an invitation to dinner can suddenly become a threatening
reality when one cannot refuse the invitation.
Los Angeles, May 11, 2018
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