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Calamity [Kalamita] (DC Labor FilmFest)
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About this event
Several years after returning to the Czechoslovak film industry from political excommunication, Věra Chytilová crafted one of her finest satires with 1982’s CALAMITY, a seemingly conventional sex comedy that takes covert aim at the Communist government’s institutional rot. When directionless slacker Honza (Bolek Polívka, soon to become a Chytilová regular) drops out of college, he decides to take on a career as a train conductor, to the perplexity of his father and friends. Yet almost nothing goes right for Honza, who must not only navigate the bureaucratic absurdities of the state-controlled railway system but also the romantic advances of three different women (Dagmar Bláhová, Jana Synková and Jaroslava Kretschmerová), leading up to an uproarious finale set on a snowbound train. Employing endlessly inventive narrative left turns, Chytilová incisively criticizes the regressive intransigence of Czechoslovakia’s “normalization” era with her patented brand of gleeful, anarchic mirth. (Note courtesy of Janus Films.) DIR/SCR Vera Chytilová; Josef Silhavý. Czechoslovakia, 1982, color, 101 min. In Czech with English subtitles. NOT RATED