Though Karel Kachyna’s The Ear was produced in 1970, I learned from the IMDb that it didn’t see a major release until almost 1990. Watching the film it’s easy to see why. The dialogue and story here add up to a criticism of the soviet government and portray paranoia about that government’s power. Certainly this alone limited the film’s capacity to be shown in Eastern bloc countries, but I’m not quite sure how Western audiences would have taken to this film either. The Ear has a unique blend of style and script that in a retrospective pitch could aptly be described as Hitchcock meets Antonioni; a combination that works here, but might not have been palatable to mass audiences in 1970.
The story centers on Ludvik (Radoslav Brzobohatý), a deputy minister in the Prague government, and his quick-tempered wife, Anna (Jirina Bohdalová). The two arrive home late from a government cocktail party to find that they’ve locked themselves out of their gated home. After fumbling about to get into the garden they begin to pick at each other, arguing about the minutia that inevitably invades movie marriages. She blames him for locking them out as he claims that she forgot the keys. When they turn up in the back door, it’s hardly funny to either of them. Also less than amusing is the fact that the power in their home is out, but oddly enough the neighbors seem to have light. Anna tries to lighten her own mood by hitting the bottle, but Ludvik starts to connect puzzle pieces in his mind. Who were the men lurking about outside the garden? Why were he and Anna chauffeured home in a ministry car? Why was his boss absent from the party? In his mind, Ludvik toils over a possible infraction; anything that could cause his department to cleanse itself of less than loyal comrades. He warns Anna that they could be under surveillance, the all-hearing ear of the title. Flippant and drunk, she chastises him for his suspicions and for forgetting their anniversary, but he is undeterred. He begins to burn documents in the toilet, hoping to purge any evidence that he supported his supervisor’s policies. For the first half of The Ear, Kachyna dances back and forth across the thin line between drama and suspense, mixing the finest elements of 1960s Italian cinema with a hint of a taught Hollywood thriller. This is the film’s strength, and it contains enough twists to keep audiences guessing, employing a particularly effective faux relief sequence at its center.
Structurally, the picture relies heavily on flashbacks to the party that, while confusing at first, break up and then reestablish the tension as the couple bickers. What becomes evident throughout the film’s packed runtime of just over 90 minutes is that despite their cruelty to one another, Ludvik and Anna care deeply about their love. This yields some touching moments toward the picture’s conclusion as the sun rises; moments that remind us that we always hurt the ones we love the most. What’s shocking is that these small gestures turn up in film with such heavy political overtones. The twist at the movie’s conclusion both confirms and negates all of the couple’s paranoia, but the humor of its irony probably wouldn’t have played in 1970.
In a time when the threat of total nuclear war was a daily reality, the domestic instability of soviet cabinet members, and of the government itself, could have spelled apocalyptic destruction. Indeed, The Ear is a film that, like Dr. Strangelove (1964), becomes funnier in retrospect because of the absolute absurdity of the cold war. It’s also a film that more poignantly melds marital drama and Big Brother-esque paranoia than most contemporary big budget Hollywood movies. In many latter-day pictures an element of relationship stress is slipped into scripts to artificially add dimension to a character, a last-minute ploy to attract a female audience. Here the relationship is the center of the film; essential to its mood and the primary dramatic focus. In the Hollywood movie the thriller element would be heavy-handed. Here it is played down, used as a cloud hanging over the head of the principal characters.
Language: Czech
Runtime: 94 minutes
Available @ Youtube.com
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