From Dark Blue World, and from its reviews which seem content to discuss the obvious without delving deeper into the film's subtext, I came away wondering if I'm the only reviewer to have discerned the film's dark metaphors and blue ciphers.
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At the outset, in prewar Czechoslovakia, Franta is in love with Hanicka who is already betrothed to a stolid tramcar factotum. The Nazi takeover of the Czech rump state, coming hard on the heels of the Anglo-French compelled Czechoslovak cession of the Sudetenland to the gobbling maws of Hitler's Germany, compels Franta and his young student pilot Karel (Matt Damon has nothing on you, Krystof Hadek!) to flee to Poland, and thence to Britain where a snobbish RAF sloughs these accomplished pilots off to train with comical devices representing fighter aeroplanes. It should be recalled that, in pursuit of appeasing Hitler, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain expressed his prewar antipathy to Czechoslovakia as "a people of whom we know nothing". Charles Dance serves well as the film's representative figure of begrudging British acceptance of, and disdainful authority over, the Czech Air Force pilots. It's interesting, perhaps significant, that the name of Franta's character alludes to the surname of the highest-scoring Battle of Britain fighter ace: Czechoslovakia's Josef Frantisek.
The supporting characters - the ill-fated, baby-faced Tom-Tom, and most strikingly Oldrich Kaiser as the world-wise Machaty, among others - lend the film healthy dimensions of depth.
Young Karel becomes besotted with Susan, an Englishwoman whose Royal Navy husband is missing in action. But after their one carnal encounter Susan rejects Karel for the older Franta. Most reviewers have depicted this as a a trite love triangle. But I think Susan is a blue cipher for the Great Britain that ultimately, at war's end, rejects the Czech pilots (and those of other occupied nations) who had come to help Britain in her hour of need: Susan's husband, an officer in the Senior Service (redolent of the hubris with which Britain treated Czechoslovakia and her warriors), returns and Susan, in the dark senior nation metaphor, coolly ends her opportunistic relationship with Franta. When Britain needed the Czechoslovak pilots it embraced them, just as when Susan needed a supportive lover she embraced Franta: the metaphor plays out with Susan's MIA husband returning in a wheelchair as a cipher for postwar Britain bereft of empire and with its economy seriously crippled.
Of course there are obvious elements in the plot: Karel's hero-worship and male bonding with Franta; and the deliciously world-weary Machaty frames Karel's promise of maturation into a never-to-be-realized prime. Much of the dogfight footage is recycled from 1969's The Battle of Britain, but it's faithful to the storyline. Aviation history purists will note that during the Battle of Britain Czech squadrons exclusively flew the Hawker Hurricane, and not the Supermarine Spitfire - but the scarcity of flyable Hurricanes mooted their appearance in favor of more numerously available Spirfires; the same historians will also point out the filmmakers' necessary substitution of CASA-built, Merlin-engined, Spanish "Bf.109 Messerschmitt" fighters for the nowadays unavailable Daimler-Benz-powered, genuine Bf. 109E of 1940.
Franta's postwar return to Czechoslovakia finds Hanicka long wedded to the tramcar factotum: which I think is a metaphor for Czechoslovakia's postwar control by faceless communist bureaucrats: Franta finds his woman/homeland in the arms of someone less bold, less deserving than those of the men who fought for her. Yet Franta leaves his prewar dog with Hanicka's children - a lovely simile for the sacrifice the Czechoslovak pilots made for their nation's future. Another tasty metaphor is Karel's in-cockpit fumbling attempt to cast his inflating rubber dinghy to the downed Franta, which causes Karel to crash to his death in the tragic sea in which his countryman (country?) is swimming for dear life.
The flash-forwards to Franta and Machaty's postwar imprisonment are haloed by the prison shop scenes in what had been a church: the ceiling frescoes seem to represent the heaven of the independent, revitalized Czechoslovakia the pilots had believed they'd fought to redeem from the war and which has, instead, been cruelly perverted into something much less than heavenly by Czechoslovak communist apparatchiks. Yet the frescoes' cherubim hearken to the flight of wishes, longings and dreams the pilots had naively entertained during their wartime absence from their homeland. Yet the angels, with their wings like those of the denounced and imprisoned pilots, symbolize the pilots' - and Czechoslovakia's - yearning for self-identity, and for material and spiritual self-possession.
The screenplay achieves a lovely balance, that teeters on one's viscera, between the hard-edged war and prison scenes, and the tender scenes of carnal and fraternal love - and through them the metaphorical love of the pilots for their occupied homeland. again, Kaiser's performance as the salty Machaty deliciously seasons the meat of the central plot. Tara Fitzgerald was, I think, a bit young for her role as Susan (I'd loved to have seen Helen Mirren, or Francesca Annis, in the part - a more mature woman would have better served as the cipher for the ancient, archetypal Britain vis-a-vis the Versailles Treaty's teenaged Czechoslovakia).
Dark Blue World is a powerfully appealing film, possessed of subtle and unsubtle metaphors, which has, I feel, from the pens of critics ignorant of Czechoslovakia's prewar and wartime relationship with Great Britain and, indeed, of Czechoslovakia's painful postwar maturation and eventual Velvet Divorce into the Czech and Slovak republics, suffered lack of recognition of its multilayered text and subtexts. In telling what appears to be a simple story director Sverak reveals his profound sensibilities, and he deserves a proper international salute, for brilliant prismatic richness of allusion, metaphor and meaning.
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At the outset, in prewar Czechoslovakia, Franta is in love with Hanicka who is already betrothed to a stolid tramcar factotum. The Nazi takeover of the Czech rump state, coming hard on the heels of the Anglo-French compelled Czechoslovak cession of the Sudetenland to the gobbling maws of Hitler's Germany, compels Franta and his young student pilot Karel (Matt Damon has nothing on you, Krystof Hadek!) to flee to Poland, and thence to Britain where a snobbish RAF sloughs these accomplished pilots off to train with comical devices representing fighter aeroplanes. It should be recalled that, in pursuit of appeasing Hitler, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain expressed his prewar antipathy to Czechoslovakia as "a people of whom we know nothing". Charles Dance serves well as the film's representative figure of begrudging British acceptance of, and disdainful authority over, the Czech Air Force pilots. It's interesting, perhaps significant, that the name of Franta's character alludes to the surname of the highest-scoring Battle of Britain fighter ace: Czechoslovakia's Josef Frantisek.
Young Karel becomes besotted with Susan, an Englishwoman whose Royal Navy husband is missing in action. But after their one carnal encounter Susan rejects Karel for the older Franta. Most reviewers have depicted this as a a trite love triangle. But I think Susan is a blue cipher for the Great Britain that ultimately, at war's end, rejects the Czech pilots (and those of other occupied nations) who had come to help Britain in her hour of need: Susan's husband, an officer in the Senior Service (redolent of the hubris with which Britain treated Czechoslovakia and her warriors), returns and Susan, in the dark senior nation metaphor, coolly ends her opportunistic relationship with Franta. When Britain needed the Czechoslovak pilots it embraced them, just as when Susan needed a supportive lover she embraced Franta: the metaphor plays out with Susan's MIA husband returning in a wheelchair as a cipher for postwar Britain bereft of empire and with its economy seriously crippled.
Franta's postwar return to Czechoslovakia finds Hanicka long wedded to the tramcar factotum: which I think is a metaphor for Czechoslovakia's postwar control by faceless communist bureaucrats: Franta finds his woman/homeland in the arms of someone less bold, less deserving than those of the men who fought for her. Yet Franta leaves his prewar dog with Hanicka's children - a lovely simile for the sacrifice the Czechoslovak pilots made for their nation's future. Another tasty metaphor is Karel's in-cockpit fumbling attempt to cast his inflating rubber dinghy to the downed Franta, which causes Karel to crash to his death in the tragic sea in which his countryman (country?) is swimming for dear life.
The flash-forwards to Franta and Machaty's postwar imprisonment are haloed by the prison shop scenes in what had been a church: the ceiling frescoes seem to represent the heaven of the independent, revitalized Czechoslovakia the pilots had believed they'd fought to redeem from the war and which has, instead, been cruelly perverted into something much less than heavenly by Czechoslovak communist apparatchiks. Yet the frescoes' cherubim hearken to the flight of wishes, longings and dreams the pilots had naively entertained during their wartime absence from their homeland. Yet the angels, with their wings like those of the denounced and imprisoned pilots, symbolize the pilots' - and Czechoslovakia's - yearning for self-identity, and for material and spiritual self-possession.
Dark Blue World is a powerfully appealing film, possessed of subtle and unsubtle metaphors, which has, I feel, from the pens of critics ignorant of Czechoslovakia's prewar and wartime relationship with Great Britain and, indeed, of Czechoslovakia's painful postwar maturation and eventual Velvet Divorce into the Czech and Slovak republics, suffered lack of recognition of its multilayered text and subtexts. In telling what appears to be a simple story director Sverak reveals his profound sensibilities, and he deserves a proper international salute, for brilliant prismatic richness of allusion, metaphor and meaning.
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