Europe Endless - Eastern Europe: The Ear (Dir Karel Kachyňa , 1h34m, 1969)

The year is 1990 and two films are up for the Palme D'Or. One is Interrogation (Przesłuchanie, dir. Ryszard Bugajski), shot in 1982 but, due to its themes of the political corruption of the Polish Communist Party, banned until the dying months of 1989. Its companion is The Ear (Ucho, Dir. Karel Kachyňa), a similarly accusatory cinematic scalpel aimed at the governing Soviets, in which a married couple, Ludvík (Radoslav Brzobohatý) and Anna (Jiřina Bohdalová), return from a party to find their house ransacked, and must contend with surveillance as their marriage slowly disintegrates around them. The Ear had spent nearly two decades in storage, also banned by the Communists. Neither film will win, the Palme D'Or going to David Lynch's fine Wild At Heart, but with the fall of Communism and the USSR, so films criticising the fallen regime, and many banned by them, begin to gain release. 

The Czech Republic, in contrast to some of the nations we have visited thus far, begins its cinematic life proper in the years after the Second World War, and comes to fruition in the Czechoslovak New Wave of the 1960s: this includes filmmakers as diverse as animator/surrealist Jan Švankmajer, the rightfully lauded Miloš Forman, whose The Firemen's Ball (1967) is a bleakly funny satire at the expense of the Communist Party. and would be one of many to be nominated for major awards, whilst much of Věra Chytilová's filmography would be banned in the 1960s, after 1966's Daisies. Whilst Karel Kachyňa does not directly belong to this movement, otherwise known as the "Czechoslovak film miracle", his films are made in this unexpectedly free period of the nation's cinema, many of which saw him partner with Jan Procházka, whose own career, and eventually his life, was destroyed by his writing being banned and his ejection from the Czech Communist Party, leading to his death at forty-two,

Set over a single evening, The Ear begins with the return home of Ludvik and Anna from a Party function: both drunk, they struggle to get into their house, or even past its gate, but immediately two things are apparent: the first is the friction between the two of them, their bickering continuing, even as they must contend with the fact their Party-allocated house has been broken into and the building bugged, through much of the film. There is something devastatingly observed - possibly Procházka drawing from his own experiences - of this juxtaposition of this disintegrating marriage falling apart over the evening, and the growing threat around them, the sharp-tongued comments that Anna delivers to the hidden listening devices she nicknames "Ear" bravado against the genuine fear of the shadowy figures in cars outside, who may take her husband and her away. 

Intercut with this is the party they have exited: here, Kachyna, DoP Josef Illík and editor Miroslav Hájek intercut the party scenes with the slowly growing tension of the night that follows: in many cases Illík uses a stark, and surprisingly modern to-camera style, the functionaries of the Communist Party of Prague talking, at points conversational and conspiratorial to us, the audience, but to Ludvik, who is often shot responding to this, hours later, and miles away, as though caught not only in the paranoia of the here and now, as the couple must work together against the inferred threat of the Party, but in dissecting what could have occurred over the evening to gain their interest. We are introduced and taken through all manner of party apparatchiks, their families, Ludvik's former army friends, and onward. It is as claustrophobic, as paranoid, as the scenes in their home, and just as revelatory as to their fragmented relationship. 

Yet, this is not simply a film about life under communism, any more than it is only a film about life in a disintegrating marriage - what does loyalty mean in this sphere, for example, the party scenes depict a microcosm of shifting loyalties where absences are as revealing as anything said. Nevertheless, it is their loyalty to each other, their attempts to navigate the absurdity of the higher echelons of the Party, that form the backbone to the film - only when working together do they begin to succeed. What is apparent, from its opening scenes is that The Ear is blackly, and occasionally bleakly funny, deliberately playing with the tension, the paranoia of its setting, winding the tension up with mysterious figures watching the house, before defusing the situation - or catapulting it into scenes that provoke a far more social form of anxiety, all of which only intensify as dawn slowly approaches. 

Even despite, or perhaps, because of its decades-long ban, The Ear remains a stark, arresting, and often grimly funny depiction of (married) life under communism.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

The Ear is available on BluRay from Second Run, and on streaming from the BFI Player. 

Next week we descend into the Budapest Metro in Kontroll