Intimate Lighting

It would be lovely if I could report that Ivan Passer, who died in January at the age of 86 (not, I gather, from Covid-19), was one of the rare exceptions, rather like his childhood friend Milos Forman, among foreign filmmakers who wound up in Hollywood and made films as good as his best work in his home country. This just isn’t the case. The list of accomplished or promising filmmakers who “escaped” to Hollywood and found work there but never managed to equal the films made in their native tongues is depressingly long. 

Passer has a place in what is looked back on as the “Czech film miracle” – a brief flowering of splendid films whose vitality has not faded in the intervening half-century. Similar creative stirrings had happened in other Iron Curtain countries in the ‘50s, especially in Poland. But filmmakers in Czechoslovakia (as it was called until December 31, 1992) were the beneficiaries of shifting political forces, what was known as a “thaw,” a loosening of strict censorship in respect to subject matter and its presentation. Such loosening came to an abrupt end in 1968 when the Russian Army entered the country from nearby East Germany. Some intellectuals, writers, artists, and ordinary freedom-loving Czechs managed to escape. Forman and Passer were among them. Others, like Jiri Menzel and Jaromil Jires, stayed. 

But it’s 1965. Passer helped Forman with the scripts for his second and third films and directed one short film, A Boring Afternoon, and one feature, Intimate Lighting. It is as fresh and alive as it was when it entered the world 55 years ago. Bohumil Hrabal (whose novels and stories formed the basis of several Czech films, including Jiri Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains) co-wrote the script of A Boring Afternoon, which was “about all the things that happen when, ostensibly, nothing is happening.”

Intimate Lighting was exported to appreciative audiences in Europe and the U.S. before being banned for twenty years for after the Russian crackdown in late 1968. It’s finer than any of Forman’s films because Passer invests its lightness with touches of whimsical beauty. Without ceremony, we enter the world of a provincial semi-professional orchestra. Karel plays violin with other musicians in an amateur ensemble (his nickname from school days is Bambas). An old friend, Petr, plays cello in a professional orchestra in Prague and comes to Karel’s town to perform with them in a concert. He brings along his cute young girlfriend, Štěpa (played by Milos Forman’s wife Věra Křesadlová). Karel has a plump wife, Marie, and three small children. His father and mother live with him a house erected brick by brick in the middle of billowing wheat fields. Petr looks at his friend’s domesticity without envy. It’s Štěpa who seems lost – the hardworking village women look at her with curiosity. All of the young people have absconded to the cities. 

Everyone in the film presents to us their ripened humanity: the grandfather who brags of amorous conquests, his wife - the woman he kidnapped and carried off to the circus, where she performed stunts on horseback (she shows one to an amazed Štěpa), Marie, happily absorbed in motherhood, a charming old pharmacist with smiling eyes, and even a village idiot who asks Štěpa to go for a walk with him. 

Praising Christopher Isherwood’s novel, A Single Man, Anthony Burgess wrote: “To make us fascinated with the everyday non-events of an ordinary life was Joyce's great achievement. But here there are no Joycean tricks to exalt mock-epically the banal.”(1) The style of the film is so naturalistic that it almost makes one overlook what is happening, the moment to moment incidents that make up the beauty of the film’s utterly plotless unfolding, until we find that it’s we who have unfolded, not the people we meet and whose lives we follow for the duration (69 minutes!) of the film. Passer loved his subject so much that he went to the trouble of presenting it to us in all its unadorned verity.

(1) 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 - A Personal Choice by Anthony Burgess (1984).