Taking Off

Miloš Forman died on 13 April in hospital in Danbury, Connecticut, and what a long way it was for an orphan boy from Čáslav to go.

Officially, Forman made three feature length films in Czechoslovakia. Having watched Taking Off a few days after Forman's death was announced last month, that number should be expanded to four. Forman, a member of the great Czech New Wave, with Black Peter (1963), Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Firemen's Ball (1968) behind him, had clearly not yet broken his stride when he made Taking Off in New York in 1970. It has the same look and feel of his free-wheeling and highly personal Czech films.

Taking Off opens with two little girls stepping in front of the camera, singing a song, smiling sweetly and walking off camera. Loves of a Blonde opens similarly with a young woman looking into the camera, strumming a guitar and singing how her love was so great it turned her into a "hooligan." The cinematographer for both films was Forman's third eye, Miroslav Ondříček, and Taking Off has the advantage of having been shot in exquisite color. Forman had (how sad to suddenly use the past tense) a brilliant eye for faces. Under the opening credits of Taking Off, Forman shows us the faces of young women auditioning before an unfazed panel of judges. Scenes from these auditions appear throughout the film. Carly Simon and Kathy Bates (credited as "Bobo Bates") are among them. There is even a naked blonde playing a cello [see photo].

The “story” of the film is about how some well-off parents, Lynn and Larry Tyne (Lynn Carlin and Buck Henry), try to understand why their 15 ½ year old daughter Jeannie (Linnea Heacock) has run away from home. They end up joining an organization of parents of runaway children who, in an earnest attempt to see things from their children's perspective, take instruction in the etiquette of pot smoking, learning how to curl their lips when they inhale, to hold it in their lungs while counting to ten, to pass a joint to the person on their left or risk "Bogarting." I couldn't tell if it reminded me of Woody Allen or Luis Buñuel. Lynn and Larry return to their home with another couple, Ben and Ann Lockston, and play “Texas one-card showdown” (strip poker), until Larry loses the game and all his clothes and stands up on the table to sing “Libiamo ne’ lieti calici” from La Traviata. Jeannie emerges from her room and looks at her naked father in shock. Trying to cover himself, he falls to the floor. Jeannie persuades her parents to invite her new boyfriend, whom she had met at the audition, to dinner. After the boyfriend (a successful musician) declines Larry’s invitation to perform for them, Larry sings “Stranger in Paradise” heartily to Lynn’s piano accompaniment. The film closes with Jeannie staring in puzzlement into the camera.

Taking Off could be misconstrued as just another youth-oriented film from the period. Universal financed the film and others like it inspired by the phenomenal success of Easy Rider. But Forman's sympathies are evenly distributed among young and old, as they had been in his Czech films. The title adds a third element to a double entendre: Jeannie "takes off" from her home, her parents take off their clothes in the strip poker game, and the film is Forman's takeoff into American films. But the film has dated rather disastrously. There was a special ugliness about Americans in the Seventies. The clothes. The haircuts. The cars. The whole hoary gestalt. Someone epitomized the era as "The Agonew and the Nixtacy."

As I mentioned above, Forman had a genius for faces, and he shows us, especially in the audition scenes interspersed throughout the film, quite a number of them. But, for me, therein lies the problem. On the official Miloš Forman website it states: "Forman managed to find the actress Linnea Heacock for the leading role, who has nearly the same expression as the actress from his previous movie Loves of a Blonde, Hana Brejchova. He came across her among some hippies, when she was splashing about with her friend in Bethesda Fountain in New York Central Park." Hana Brejchova was a real find. She is one of the main reasons that Loves of a Blonde is interesting to watch. Her face manages to express a range of emotions all at once. Linnea Heacock is pretty from certain angles, but when she looks into the camera (as she does in an unnerving take at the end of Taking Off as Buck Henry belts out the song "Strangers in Paradise") she looks utterly bovine.

In the opening scene of Black Peter, Forman's very first film as director, a store manager is readying his business for opening, and he lets in one shopgirl after another. Every passing face is eloquent, splendidly lived in. These middle-European faces are the stuff of Forman's aesthetic, and when he found out, as his compatriots in the Czech New Wave (Menzel, Jireš, Schorm) all found out, that he could no longer practice that aesthetic in his homeland without draconian constraints, he did what so many dissident artists had done before him and defected. As we have seen so many times before, defection may offer improvements in an artist's liberty to express himself without having to live clandestinely, underground or in secret, but he is effectively cut off from his muse, from the source of his aesthetic. This is especially true of emigré filmmakers. The faces that Forman shows us in Taking Off are the faces of a melting pot culture with no identifiable image of its own - a hodgepodge of races and ethnicities whose whole is always less, not greater, than the sum of its disparate parts. With a borrowed, displaced identity, America is the destination of displaced persons, displaced by war, poverty, and oppression, and Hollywood is a mecca for displaced filmmakers.

Forman wouldn't make another film until 1975, with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Its phenomenal success green-lighted the rest of Forman's Hollywood career. His close friend, Ivan Passer, whose Intimate Lighting remains one of the highlights of the Prague Spring, wasn't so lucky. After scoring - for me - a hit with Cutter's Way (1981), his career floundered. But then I remind myself of the fates of the filmmakers who chose to stay in Czechoslovakia. Jiří Menzel's Larks on a String was filmed in 1969. After the Dubcek government fell in August of 1968, it was banned and Menzel prevented from making another film until 1974. Now 80, he still lives and works in the Czech Republic. Jaromil Jireš made a brilliant adaptation of Milan Kundera's novel The Joke in 1969. It was subsequently banned for twenty years. Jireš continued to work in Czech film and television until his death in 2001.

In the online Prague Daily Monitor, it is pointed out that Miloš Forman was "the most successful Czech film-maker in history". Events honoring his memory were held in his hometown of Čáslav including a screening of Amadeus in which locations shot in Prague double for 18th-century Vienna. Proceeds from ticket sales will go to FAMU, the Film Faculty of the Czech Academy of Performing Arts. FAMU is the Czech film academy among whose illustrious graduates Forman counted himself.