The Dark Knight

Heath Ledger's Joker is not actually in The Dark Knight as much as the film's marketing would have one believe, but he is nevertheless at the film's core, as its motivating spirit and one half of its dualist moral compass. If director Christopher Nolan's first Batman film, the origin story Batman Begins, took as its model the famously dark Frank Miller stories of the mid-80s, and especially Batman: Year One, this new installment takes off from Alan Moore's even nastier The Killing Joke. Miller's Batman may have launched the darker, grittier take on the bat-eared crimefighter, but Moore's slightly later short story considerably ups the ante, positing a Joker who only wants to prove that anyone can be driven to madness, and a Batman who exists as a moral flipside to this evil clown, only a few short steps from the same fate. In Moore's story, the Joker's origin becomes a dark mirror of Batman's own, as hero and villain are linked by the kind of circumstances that drove them to what they eventually became. As far as the Joker is concerned, it only takes "one bad day" for an ordinary person to be pushed over the edge into insanity; the story's ambiguous ending suggests that, while the Joker was proved wrong in this particular instance, there might be something to his theory after all. The infamous final panels show Batman and the Joker laughing together over a joke, cackling and doubled over, sharing a moment of insanity together.

There is no such moment in The Dark Knight, but Moore's ideas drive the film and underpin its moral inquiries. A great deal of the well-earned praise being heaped upon Ledger's portrayal of the Joker stems from the fact that this performance completely nails the qualities of the character in his most iconic comic book appearances. This isn't the dapper, mannered Joker that Jack Nicholson brought to the screen in Tim Burton's original Batman. Nicholson's performance was too controlled; he's scary, but only in the way a typical criminal killer is scary. Ledger's Joker, on the other hand, perfectly captures the unpredictable menace of the Moore/Miller Jokers — this is a villain who is motivated by a warped ideology, who only wants to introduce chaos into the ordered lives of the people around him. Even the catchphrase the character uses reflects the differences in the two portrayals. Nicholson's Joker famously asked, "Have you ever danced with the Devil in the pale moonlight?" It's a great line, poetic even, and so memorable that it's probably my strongest memory of Burton's film today. But Ledger cuts to the chase, and there's no poetry when he asks his victims, before giving them knife scars to match his own: "Why so serious?"

In keeping with this anarchic, ragged outlook, Ledger's face is smeared with greasy makeup, his lips permanently twisted upwards in a sinister smile by the bright red scars stretching off the sides of his lips. His green hair is similarly unruly, long and unwashed and twisted, and his makeup gets progressively messier the longer he's onscreen. This film's major theme is chaos versus order, and the Joker is a true apostle of chaos, positing unsolvable moral dilemmas for both Batman and the citizens of Gotham City, encouraging the spread of his own nihilistic philosophy. Ledger is so terrifying here because he truly inhabits this spirit. His cackling laugh, his halting speech, the way his tongue is continually flicking against his lips; it all adds up to a performance of uncompromising rigor, a truly inspired image of madness. His Joker is believable, realistic even, in a way that the clownish Nicholson performance never was; this Joker seems to have leapt from the comic pages to take on corporeal reality, and he's much creepier for the naturalistic touches that flesh him out. He's also often hilarious, and some of the best aspects of Ledger's performance are pantomimed. The actor reportedly spent the most time working on the Joker's voice, which is perfect with its slightly whiny, hesitant rhythms, but he's at his best with the physicality of this character, the way he moves, the way he cocks his head, the way he telegraphs his actions like a stage clown. When he's approaching Bruce Wayne's childhood friend Rachel (Maggie Gyllenhaal, improving upon Katie Holmes' dismal turn in the first movie), he clumsily brushes the hair away from his ears with his fists, a gesture of suave seduction made gruesome and slimy. In a later scene, he turns the Joker's demolition of a hospital into farcical slapstick, dressed as a nurse, fumbling with a reticent detonator and then nervously skipping and flitting about when the explosives belatedly go off. The character is exactly how he should be, both funny and sinister, eliciting gasps of horror and nervous laughter in an early scene where he performs a "magic trick" involving a pencil for a group of mobsters.

The enormity of Ledger's phenomenal performance — and, let's face it, his tragic death — have tended to overshadow the rest of The Dark Knight, but there is a lot going on in this film that doesn't involve the Joker. In fact, Nolan's second Batman movie is in every way an improvement on the already auspicious Batman Begins, building upon the first film's establishment of the Batman mythos to further riff upon the ideas of morality and justice inherent in most superhero tales, and doubly so in the Batman legend. In keeping with the film's emphasis on pairing, much of the film's drama stems from the contrast between Batman (Christian Bale) and the new Gotham District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart). For Batman, Dent represents a way out, a chance to retire the costume and the vigilantism in a city that no longer needs his services. Nolan's Batman is perhaps most unique, most differentiated from other incarnations of the character, to the extent that he does not want to continue bearing this mantle. The ultimate goal of this Batman is to bring his city to a place where he is redundant, where civilian justice can resume its ordinary workings free of corruption. If Batman and the Joker are two sides of a particularly ugly coin, then Batman and Dent are similarly related, both seeking justice in fundamentally different ways, one through the law and the other with his fists.

This theme of duality is carried through the film in various ways, from the Joker's either/or moral dilemmas, to Dent's eventual fate that causes him to encompass both sides of a scarred coin in one person. Nolan's choice of comic texts to work from was wise, and he draws liberally from the best Batman stories in order to explore that archetypal superhero subject, the nature of good and evil. The film's view of these opposing forces is not always black and white; the Joker's treatises on disorder and anarchy often have a subversive logic to them, while Dent and Batman sometimes seem to be slipping away from unambiguous goodness. This is especially true of the film's unexpected political undertones, in which the superhero turns to warrantless electronic surveillance of ordinary civilians in order to apprehend the Joker. It's hard to tell exactly where the film stands at times like this, though Bruce Wayne's advisor Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) is an uncompromising voice against such questionable methods. The film is hardly an unqualified endorsement of Batman's exceptionalist pursuit of his own brand of justice. There's a suggestion, carried over from the Miller and Moore comics, that the appearance of Batman as a figure of good in Gotham City gave rise to corresponding figures of evil, equally stylized and exaggerated villains who responded to Batman's dress-up games and took them to even darker places. The Joker intimates on several occasions that he could not exist without the Batman, and he seems to be right. It's easy to see how the outrageousness of a crimefighter dressed like a bat would inspire a new breed of evil to oppose him. The Joker and Batman develop in relation to each other, inspiring each other's methods. When Wayne says, "I see what kind of man I would have to become to defeat him," he's only mirroring the Joker's own development as a response to his bat persona. The film's basic thrust is a vicious circle, in which the villain and the hero must constantly morph in response to each other, moving ever closer to one another as they battle. This is the trap for goodness that the film posits, a trap that casts Batman's endorsement of illegal law enforcement procedures in a new and more sinister light.

The film is continually underpinned by such moral inquiries, but its main appeal still lies in its energy. It's a dark and potent thrill ride, even more exhilarating than Nolan's first Batman film. The director seems to have learned some lessons from that first effort at helming an action movie. His fight sequences are still brutal, kinetic, and rapidly edited, but they're also much cleaner and clearer, not as hazy and confused as the action sequences from the first film. Nolan's direction has improved tremendously by the simple step of pulling his camera just slightly back in these scenes, giving his fight scenes greater spatiality and clarity. There aren't as many of the "who's punching whom?" moments that sometimes marred Batman Begins, and the car chase scene is equally improved, as well as being intimately connected with the plot here; the similar scene in the first film just seemed like gratuitous eye candy. The film also shares its predecessor's deliberate sense of timing. Nolan instinctively recognizes what many other action directors never do, that an action movie works best when its thrills and violence are modulated, not delivered nonstop but with careful timing. The Dark Knight is just as carefully paced as Batman Begins, letting the plot develop naturally, and not milking too much screen time from its two sensational villains. The temptation might've been to smear the screen with Ledger's terrifying Joker, or with Dent's transformed visage in the second half, but the film is better for its restraint. This is a smart, exciting movie that hits all the right notes.

All the Real Girls

David Gordon Green's second film All the Real Girls, much like its quietly affecting predecessor George Washington, doesn't seem like much. It's a simple love story, tenderly and sympathetically told without fuss or artificial drama. Indeed, the love story itself appears as just one thread within the film's loose, meandering chronicle of life in a small, rural town with a beautiful atmosphere but not much to do. Green spends some time with the town's inhabitants, these young fuck-ups and nobodies who sit around drinking beers, fixing cars, and screwing the local girls who get passed around from guy to guy with little emotion involved. There's a sadness, an understated melancholy, that seems to hang around these people like the hazy early morning fog that occasionally drifts across the cracked, sun-baked ground. Green knows how to capture these people, letting their stories unravel in small increments, snatched fragments of moments that seem to cut off in mid-thought. The editing is elliptical, sometimes maddeningly so, and the film's structure is free associative. Little bits of story show through here and there in between meditative shots of the town's gorgeous Appalachian mountain surroundings, or brief restful moments that seem to have nothing to do with the narrative and everything to do with the way these people really live their lives. It's a unique romance where the director seems as interested in a sunset landscape devoid of people, or in the male lead's poignant relationship with his girlfriend's Down syndrome younger brother, as he is in the main romantic storyline.

Still, it's undeniable that the main story here, the center around which everything else is arranged, is the tentative first love of Paul (Paul Schneider, who also co-wrote the script with Green) and Noel (Zooey Deschanel). Noel is the sister of Paul's best friend Tip (Shea Whigham), a local rabble-rouser who knows all too well about Paul's checkered history with girls, his habit of always becoming the "asshole ex-boyfriend" when he's down with his latest score. This tension could have provided the essential drama for a more typical romance, and it does threaten to boil over periodically in the first half of the film, but then Green pulls a surprise by having Tip and Paul quietly, lovingly reconcile their differences, in a scene almost as sweet as any between the young lovers themselves. Even so, though there are plenty of "guy bonding" moments like this between these simple guys and their friends, the heart of the film is the sometimes troubled romance between Paul and Noel, and it's a remarkably sweet and sincere onscreen romance that Green is presenting here.

Green's characters are inevitably interesting because they seem torn, like his films in general, between realism and stylization. His dialogue has a peculiar, halting quality that is unlike anything else I've heard. This is certainly not a Hollywood-clever romance where the leads simply trade quips and verbally spar for two hours, kissing in between. At the same time, though it's tempting to ascribe the dialogue's awkward, sometimes strained quality to a quest for realism, capturing the way people really talk to each other, it's not quite that either. His characters definitely don't speak like real people, but the rhythms of their conversations, the pauses, the moments that seem natural and improvised, the failed attempts at jokes: these things do feel real anyway. These characters may be delivering Green's stylized lines, and sometimes stumbling over the awkward phrases he puts in their mouths, but even so their reality is hard to deny. It helps that the dialogue, even when it oversteps its bounds, never errs on the side of cliché. The writing sometimes seems too willfully idiosyncratic, too quirky for its own sake, but it never interferes with the essential reality of these characters and this place.


A few more words are probably necessary, in fact, about the remarkable lengths that Green goes to establish a sense of place. His visual rhythms and his concern for landscape have often been attributed (probably rightly) to the influence of Terrence Malick, and yet the small town in this film seems to have an even closer relationship with the slightly surreal rural town of David Lynch's Twin Peaks. There are shots of a local mill that directly reference the famous opening credits of Lynch's early 90s TV series, juxtaposing serene nature with industrial processes, cutting between peaceful landscape shots and grinding rotors or the pulsating needles of an industrial sewing machine. Green, like Lynch, has real affection for this milieu, for the beauty created by this tension between man-made structures and unblemished nature. He seems to find equal beauty, and equal capacity for awe, in an orange-hued sunset and a factory with smoke billowing out, lit in the night by iridescent blue light. At one point, after a traumatic argument triggers a break in the couple's romance, Green traces the passage of time with a lengthy sequence in which the film's characters are only seen in random, very brief moments, speaking at most fragments of dialogue. The bulk of this segment is instead dedicated to shots of the town's unpopulated outskirts, time lapse clouds speeding by overhead as the camera takes in this gorgeous rural area and the downtrodden people who inhabit it.

This is a sweet, warm, ambiguous film that seems to be only scratching the surface of these characters' lives. There's an impression that Green is deliberately keeping his distance, allowing these people to retain their mystery and their uniqueness. What the camera shows are fragments of conversations that cut away in mid-sentence, and isolated moments of inactivity snatched from days that seem to consist of nothing but this aimless passivity. There are also moments of unimaginable joy. Green has a powerful sense of humor, but it shows up in the oddest, most unexpected places, and rarely in the form of a joke. Instead, there are moments that hit one with an inexplicable force, eliciting genuine gales of laughter at the absurdity of it all. In one scene, Paul and his clown mother (Patricia Clarkson) entertain a group of sick kids at a hospital. In another, Paul executes some wonderfully silly dance moves behind Noel's back, in the middle of a bowling alley; "I could do this for an hour," he says, and I might've been willing to watch. Green earns another burst of laughter with the scene where Paul enters a stock car race, with a priceless payoff. As usual, Green increases the humor with understatement; the humor isn't overplayed, but casually revealed in the middle of the scene when the camera pulls back for a wide view. One of the best minor characters, the sleazy but good-hearted Bust-Ass (Danny McBride), also gets the film's best line: when asked if he likes waffles or French toast, he says, "The places I usually go ain't that fancy."

With characters like this, in a down-home rural milieu where nothing much ever happens, All the Real Girls could've easily slipped into condescension. But Green's affection for these characters is always apparent. For these people, saying "I'm stupid" isn't a put-down, it's a declaration, an acknowledgment of truth, and Green never mocks them for their simplicity, nor does he fall into the reverse trap of mythologizing them too much. They're simple, maybe stupid, limited in their experiences and their ambitions alike, and it's unlikely that most of them will ever leave this small town. Even so, within these confined boundaries, the images and moments that make up this film's patchwork portrait are rich and emotionally fertile. Green finds a lot to love in these characters, approaching them and their stories on their own terms, and comes away with a small gem of a romance and a fine sophomore film.

Carnal Knowledge

Carnal Knowledge is the kind of comedy where the laughs increasingly stick in one's throat; this is dangerously barbed comedy, laughter laced with poison. In fact, the film is often incredibly uncomfortable to watch, its raw-nerve examination of sexual gamesmanship and strife continually crossing the line from satirical observation to overpowering psychological reality. As a stark satire of the games that men and women play with each other, and the unreasonable expectations and competing ideas that each gender brings to relationships, there is no better or harsher film. Of course, this kind of psychological acuity is exactly what one should expect from the auspicious pairing of Village Voice cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who originally wrote this as a play, and director Mike Nichols, who adapted the script for the screen.

Split into three acts, the film follows a pair of men from their college days, to their middle age, to their aging decline, all the while tracing the ways in which these two very different men seek some ill-defined "something" from the women in their lives. In many ways, Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) and Sandy (Art Garfunkel), are direct descendants of their prototypes in Feiffer's long-running Voice comic strip: the macho tough guy Huey, and the sensitive, gentle, perennial best friend Bernard. These two characters developed naturally in Feiffer's strip from the two "types" who would continually crop up whenever his satirical pen touched upon sexual politics and the gender war. Jonathan, like Huey, is basically an asshole, a guy who cares about little besides sex, who views each woman as an opportunity for a conquest and fears being trapped in a relationship for too long. Sandy is more the Bernard type: he's sensitive, caring, an intelligent conversationalist, someone who women naturally gravitate to as friends rather than lovers. Ironically, Sandy would like to be a Huey instead, and he takes advice from his more aggressive friend, advice that surprisingly enough seems to work even when it seems like incredibly bad advice.

The film opens in the college years, when both Sandy and Jonathan are virgins looking, more than anything, to get their first score. Right from the start, the film establishes its approach with the credits, which are accompanied by the unseen friends chatting about what they'd like from a woman — a contradictory and impossible laundry list that spans from huge breasts to being bright, but not too bright. Despite these high expectations, Sandy soon meets and begins dating the pretty, intelligent Susan (Candice Bergen), who likes him but is reluctant to make their relationship too physical; she has no passion for him, and he's trapped in the Bernard cliché of the best friend. On the other hand, when Susan meets the deceptive, sneering, but oddly charming Jonathan, she definitely feels something for him: contempt for his cheerful willingness to go behind his friend's back, but also an animal attraction for him that makes her go to bed with him before she ever does with Sandy. As a result, Susan becomes trapped between the two men and their expectations for her, even as the men are wounded by her indecisiveness about them and what she wants from them. For Sandy, Susan is a revelation, a woman who opens up to him and tells him about "thoughts I never even knew I had," while with Jonathan she seems much different, more sexually open but intellectually closed-off. In a self-fulfilling prophecy, both of these self-absorbed men find in Susan exactly what they were looking for and nothing more — they certainly don't find Susan herself, only the sides of her that reflect themselves. Eventually, and absurdly, even though he's the one going behind his friend's back, Jonathan becomes the jealous one, lambasting Susan for not giving more of her inner self to him, the way she does with Sandy. Their relationship essentially ends with Jonathan screaming, in childish exasperation, "Tell me my thoughts! Tell me my thoughts!"

Susan is a victim here of Jonathan's momentary, and as it turns out fleeting, realization that there can be more to relationships than just sex. His interest in her was purely prurient at first — indeed, he only pursued her after he heard about her willingness to go further than kissing with Sandy — but she must have awakened something in him that wanted more. It's possible to read Jonathan's character throughout the rest of the film as his unconscious denial of that realization, especially in light of the scene after their breakup where Sandy and Susan get ready to go camping. Throughout the scene, Nichols keeps the camera in a tight closeup on Nicholson's face, shrouded in shadows, as in the foreground the blurry forms of the two newly recommitted lovers shift back and forth, preparing for their trip. Jonathan is silent throughout the scene, even when one of the others addresses him, and his eyes are going steely and cold; it looks like a full retreat into the Huey persona, a decision to seek nothing more than sex from women.


This kind of closeup, so potent in this scene, is a crucial aspect of Nichols' approach to the film in general. The closeup is perhaps the film's signature shot, especially tight closeups that put the focus squarely on the nuances of the performances. There is also a gender element to these closeups, in terms of the way they're used differently for the men and the women in the film. For the most part, the men are the only characters who are allowed to speak freely in these intimate closeups. Each of the two friends deliver lengthy monologues on their inner states, desires, and dissatisfaction, spoken while looking directly into a camera that seems to be just inches away. These shots place the spectator in the position of the other friend, the other half of a conversation, listening in on the most private thoughts of these people who come to seem like familiar friends even if they're both often pitiable and unlikeable. In contrast, the women's closeups are silent, impassive, revealing nothing, largely because these women are seen almost entirely through the eyes of their lovers. Neither Jonathan nor Sandy ever tries to see a woman for herself, for a complicated person with her own thoughts, ideas, desires, and human emotions. Where Jonathan sees only sex, Sandy sees an idealized, transcendent other, so far from his own sphere that she might as well be an alien; neither man sees a fellow person or equal. The closeups reflect this disparity. Susan is seen in a striking, very long closeup where she simply laughs, turning red and howling with delight at the mostly unheard banter of the unseen men offscreen, throwing her head back, squinting her eyes, looking at times like she's on the verge of crying. It's a remarkable shot, sustained for so long that there is no choice but to contemplate the essential impenetrability of this woman. What is she thinking? What does she feel for these men she's with? What does she want? They're questions that barely occur to the two men, a point that Nichols makes with understated economy simply by keeping Susan's inscrutable face onscreen for so long, without allowing her to launch into the kind of inner monologue that lets us understand the men so fully.

Later, Jonathan's lover Bobbie (Ann-Margret) gets a similar closeup, revealing nothing in a scene where she seems to be deep in thought, her mind moving in ways we can barely imagine, and which Jonathan never seems curious to find out. Bobbie is a pure sex kitten to him, with the "huge breasts" he always wanted, wild in bed and endlessly fun to be with, but somehow this still isn't enough, and he makes every effort to avoid getting "trapped" in a marriage with this fun, sexy woman. Jonathan never seems to realize that he is continually looking for women who he wants only sex from, and then growing dissatisfied with them when they don't give him more than sex. In fact, Bobbie very well might have had more to offer, but she seems cowed and discouraged by a long series of relationships very much like this one; at one point, she tells Jonathan that after the abuse she's endured he seems positively gentle. She's reduced here to speaking in an entirely generic, neutered way, a far cry from the bluntly honest monologues that the men deliver to each other. The only way she knows how to express what she wants is to say she wants to get married, an idea that seems to hold more meaning for her than its obvious connotations, and which is almost entirely abstracted from the realities of her actual relationship with Jonathan. Certainly, when she plaintively tells him this in the midst of an argument during which he has done nothing but berate and insult her, it seems absurd to think she'd actually want to marry this man. The unspoken subtext, unspoken because these men never give the women a chance to express themselves, is that marriage represents for Bobbie a stability and fulfillment that is completely lacking from any of her relationships with men. It's the same urge for an undefinable and probably unrealistic "more" that powers both male leads; the difference is that the men never allow her or any other woman they meet to express this urge. All of this is present wholly in Ann-Margret's phenomenal performance, which manages to convey both the fun-loving male fantasy and the inner turmoil of this character. In her closeup, she simply sits against a blank white wall in bed, naked and photographed from the shoulders up, slightly off-center in the frame as she thinks, her mind churning through unknown thoughts glimpsed behind her eyes.


The closeup is the film's most rigorously applied formal device, but Nichols alternates this intimate shot with, basically, two other kinds of shots which define the film's aesthetic in more subtle ways. The first of these is the two-shot, usually used in Hollywood films for romantic couples but here mostly reserved for shots of Sandy and Jonathan together. The second is a tableau-like long shot that is very theatrical in its effect, a quality that has often been cited as a knock against Nichols, who is a theater director in addition to his involvement in films, but is here used in very effective ways. This is particularly apparent in a scene between Bobbie and Jonathan, after they've had a vicious argument, and Nichols pulls back to show the couple separated by the uncrossable gulf of their own bedroom, using the full extent of the widescreen vista to emphasize the distance between the couple. In the background, the phone rings unanswered, a nagging presence on the soundtrack contributing to the scene's unresolvable tension. It's a striking use of the fusion between cinematic and theatrical modes of treating space, with the viewing angle and the spartan sets suggesting a theatrical viewpoint even as Nichols utilizes the cinema's sense of negative space to communicate his characters' alienation.

This is a dark, even angry film, especially for a comedy. There's something about Feiffer's writing that seems to translate in especially bitter, sardonic ways to the screen. In his comics, his humor often seems more tempered, more wryly satirical, with the darker undercurrents more subdued. There are darker touches in his cartooning, like the famous Voice strip where a woman goes into the country to smell the flowers, only to be killed by a shotgun that's growing there instead, but even his darkest strips aren't quite as pointed and unfiltered as this hate-filled relationship comedy or the even more bitter Alan Arkin-directed Little Murders. It may just be that Feiffer's satire is easier to take when it's abstracted, when it's being delivered by his casually sketched cartoon figures, who seem more like whimsical pen strokes than actual people. The emotions and ideas and, yes, the humor, being expressed simply hit much harder in the context of the film's stark realism. In fact, there are scenes here that are almost unbearable in their raw, awkward humanity, like the scene where Sandy attempts to convince an unwilling but naked Susan to sleep with him for the first time. The way he's pawing at her, his earnest neediness coupled with clumsy sexual predation, makes one wonder if Nicolas Roeg had this scene in mind when casting Garfunkel for the execrable Bad Timing a decade later. In any case, Garfunkel is far better here, because far more believable; he's a normal and fairly decent guy who wants to get laid and has to (or thinks he has to) become a bit of a bastard to get what he wants. This disparity between inner and outer personae, and the corruption of male/female dynamics by warped expectations and distorted desires, is the angry indictment at the core of Carnal Knowledge.

The Firemen's Ball

[This is cross-posted at the Film of the Month Club, where this film is July's title, selected for discussion by Marilyn of Ferdy On Films. I am posting this general review both here and at the Club blog, and I will also be writing some more specifically focused posts on the film throughout this month, especially for the Club.]


Made just before he left Czechoslovakia for the US, The Firemen's Ball was director Miloš Forman's first color film, his final film in his native country, and also the reason he had to leave his country in order to continue making films. It's easy to see why. The film is, quite obviously to both modern audiences and, apparently, Czech censors, a thinly veiled critique of the Czech Communist Party and, more audaciously, of the very idea of collective action that underpins socialism. This is a deadpan, hilarious satire, documenting a single night at a small-town party organized by the local fire brigade, honoring their retiring chairman on his eighty-sixth birthday (they missed honoring him on the more meaningful eighty-fifth, a year earlier, in the first of many fumbles committed by this incompetent assemblage). From the very beginning, even before the credits, Forman sets the scene for the idiocy to come, as the firemen accuse each other of stealing the prizes from the night's lottery fund, and set fire to the banner that was to hang above the hall during the ball. The fact that they're unable to even operate the equipment to put out this small-scale blaze is both the first comment on the extent of their incompetence and a bit of foreshadowing for the film's surprisingly poignant climax.

Of course, things only get worse from here. These are men who can manage to screw up the process of selecting beauty contest participants in what seems to be a ballroom positively crammed with attractive young women. Their chosen finalists are either aggressively plain or exaggeratedly awkward, like the girl who pads her bra to such an extent that her dress seems to be held away from her body on tent posts. Forman simply lets absurd scenarios like this play out in natural ways, sticking with this anonymous and ridiculous committee as they bungle their way through every aspect of the party's planning. Over the course of the evening, the table piled high with lottery gifts is slowly emptied by multiple (and unseen) thieveries, young couples copulate under tables, the chairman seems senile and lost, and keeps executing a slow, stately walk towards the stage at completely inappropriate moments, and the beauty contest itself falls apart, in one of the film's most hysterical scenes, when the contestants all get cold feet and begin fleeing.

Forman stages all this in an atmosphere of rapidly escalating chaos, as the party spirals completely out of control. His camera is intimate, casual, and perfectly attuned to the spirit of anarchic insanity running throughout this room. Indeed, Forman often seems to be taking gleeful pleasure in the lunacy going on everywhere. His mise en scène encompasses, essentially, two different visions of collectivity: the ordered committee action of the party organizers, and the wild, unfettered anarchy of the party itself. For Forman, both of these possible outcomes are equally absurd, and both are clearly tied to aspects of Communist society — just as the fire brigade stand in for the Communist Politburo, the partygoers are the proletariat, trapped within an absurd situation with absurd leaders, and forced by these circumstances to act in dishonest and despicable ways. This is a system that privileges dishonesty. Confronted with the fact that all the lottery prizes have been stolen, the fire committee decides that the people who didn't steal will just have to think of it as if there was a lottery and they didn't win. After all, everyone bought tickets; those who stole the prizes were simply the winners. When one of the committee members has an unusual attack of guilt and is caught attempting to return a stolen prize, his comrades are angry at him, not for stealing (that's expected), but for trying to return the prize, thus damaging the reputation of the fire brigade.


Forman's framing of the fire brigade inevitably enforces the point that they are nominally in charge but crippled by their indecisiveness, incompetence, and corruption. The group is almost always photographed together, seldom with the members isolated from one another for any length of time — the exception is when the one member has his moment of repentance. Most of them are not even given names. They are anonymous figureheads, an idealized group that acts together with no trace of individuality. Or so goes the Communist theory, Forman seems to be saying wryly. In practice, his head-on depictions of these men, massed into groups, projects an image exactly the opposite of the unity and collective action that is the ideal of socialist politics. As they cluster into tight formations, staring tentatively and fearfully at the camera, they look lost, like scared individuals trying to hide within the safety of a larger group. Forman's perspective, his deadpan camera angles and his objective distance from the assembled old men, gives them a pathetic quality that's heightened, not lessened, by their collectivity. It's this subversive questioning of collective action that is most radical in Forman's film, and is probably what the Czech censors responded to the most ferociously, even if it only registered with them subconsciously.

Not that "the people" make out any better here. The leadership may be idiotic, but the people they're leading are stubborn, unwilling to be led, and forthrightly dishonest. If Forman's vision of committee leadership is marked by its static angles and clustered compositions, his party scenes have a wildness and spontaneity that presents the reverse of this rigidly absurd group leadership. These scenes are chaotic accumulations of bodies whirling and flying past, often broken down so that only body parts can be seen. Individual shots focus on the legs of the dancers, or their arms and torsos in the midst of a frenetic riot, or their amassed heads in a sea as they listen to a speaker on stage. Best of all is the complete breakdown of order that accompanies the beauty contest, as the contestants run away and the crowd quickly degenerates into chaos, with crowds of guys attempting to corner the women and drag them on stage, throwing girls over their shoulders, even roping in girls who hadn't been in the contest to begin with. It's a masterpiece of completely unrestrained society, "the people" breaking loose of their inept masters and having fun watching the destruction of their social order. But Forman's editing in this scene is also surprisingly crisp, his images maintaining the perfect economy of his more structured compositions even when the stampeding revelers seem to be disrupting any semblance of order. Forman's portrait of disorder is perfectly conceived, achieved with a natural sense for visual rhythms and purely visual humor.

The Firemen's Ball is a delightful film, but also a film with a very serious heart beating beneath its surface humor. As the film's climax reveals, the incompetence of the fire brigade, which seems so comical in the context of a disastrous party, can also have serious consequences when applied to real world matters. When these bumblers are placed in charge of not a beauty contest but of public safety, the true extent of their bumbling, and its horrifying results, becomes readily apparent. This is why the sequence of the old man's house burning, placed where it is within the film, is so heartrending. As Forman cuts precisely back and forth between shots of the consuming, brilliant fire and the emotional faces of the observing crowd, the hopeless non-efforts of the firemen to extinguish this blaze are not funny, but incredibly depressing. The same could be said of the later scene where the committee members even bungle the presentation of an award to their former chairman, who is now dying of cancer. This old man's quiet dignity and patience in the face of the evening's many disasters make a mockery of the committee's ham-fisted attempts to honor him. A decent man in a corrupt system, he is entirely out of place here, and he becomes a victim as a result. This is a hilarious film, but its humor is cut with bitter satire, with a deep disgust for the absurdities of the political system of Czechoslovakia at the time.