Jiří Menzel was one of many talented young filmmakers who embraced the "Prague Spring," the brief window of (relative) artistic freedom in the otherwise authoritarian communist government in 1960s Czechoslovakia. Along with such filmmakers as Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová, Ivan Passer and Jan Němec, Menzel slipped social commentary and political satire into giddy, ambitious and sophisticated films via humor and metaphor, and his work attracted worldwide attention even while colliding with censors at home. His feature debut, the bittersweet romantic comedy Closely Watched Trains (1966), became an international hit and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1968, making Menzel the face of what was called the "Czech New Wave" to the world at large.

A sense of innocence and whimsy weaves through Closely Watched Trains, which is set during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. For his follow-up, Menzel took a lighter subject. Based on a 1926 novel by Czech writer Vladislav Vančura, Capricious Summer opens on three middle-aged men--a businessman (Rudolf Hrusínský), a priest (Frantisek Rehák) and a military officer (Vlastimil Brodský, who costarred in Closely Watched Trains)--who spend their days drinking and having good-natured arguments at a riverside bathhouse. They are jolted out of their routines by the arrival of a shabby traveling magician and tightrope walker (Menzel himself) and his beautiful young assistant (Jana Drchalová) in a ramshackle caravan. While the three men haplessly attempt to seduce the comely blonde, the businessman's frustrated wife (Míla Myslíková) falls for the magician and moves into his caravan. Menzel, who was untrained as an actor but learned his craft performing in works by fellow filmmakers, learned to walk the high wire for the film, and his awkward performance walking the tightrope adds to the film's atmosphere of high ideals colliding with a prosaic reality.

Capricious Summer is a bittersweet comedy in a rural setting with whimsical flourishes. The title refers as much to the weather, where rains constantly erupt from seemingly clear skies and disappear just as quickly, as to the behavior of the men emboldened by this late onset spring fever. The bucolic setting--a bathhouse on a gentle river--and the mix of lazy days and sex recalls Jean Renoir's A Day in the Country (1946), which Menzel cited as "the film which literally enlightened me" in a 2008 interview. And as with all of his films, Menzel brings a warm, humanistic treatment to his characters and their foibles. "We all know that life is cruel and sad," Menzel once said. "What's the point of demonstrating this in films? Let us show that we're brave by laughing at life. And in that laughter let us not look for cynicism but rather reconciliation."

"Jiri Menzel's gentle, autumnal comedy is slightly oblique, like its title," wrote New York Times film critic Vincent Canby, who proclaimed it "a much more interesting and personal movie than Closely Watched Trains." The wry comedy opened the 1968 New York Film Festival and became one of the most popular Czech New Wave films in Menzel's home country. Its social satire steered clear of political commentary, which enabled Menzel to immediately begin his next film. Larks on a String, a scathing indictment of Czechoslovakia's Communist regime featuring Hrusínský as a stiff government bureaucrat and Brodský as a professor doing hard labor for critical comments. The film was in production when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague and the government clamped down on artistic freedoms. It was banned by censors and Menzel found his career halted. "It was not just me who was not allowed to make films," he recalled in a 1990 interview. "All the younger generation of filmmakers who before had been successful were without work." But he refused to leave Czechoslovakia, as his fellow filmmakers Miloš Forman and Ivan Passer did, and he agreed to publicly denounce the Czech New Wave and work within the strictures of the government restrictions to resume filmmaking.

Since then, he's directed numerous films, including the Oscar-nominated My Sweet Little Village (1985) and I Served the King of England (2006), and his banned Larks on a String was finally released in 1990 (after the fall of the Communist government) and won the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival. Since then, he has worked as a teacher at the state film school, FAMU, and as an actor, appearing in dozens of films and costarring in the hit 1990s TV show Hospoda, a sitcom loosely (and unofficially) based on Cheers (the title translates as "Pub").

Sources:
"The Joy of Blathering - An Interview with Jiri Menzel," Robert Barry. The Bomb Party, Tuesday, 29 April 2008.
"Capricious Summer: A Gentle Comedy," Vincent Camby. The New York Times, September 25, 1968.
"Capricious Summer: Sunny Interlude," Michael Koresky. Eclipse Series 32: Pearls of the Czech New Wave, Criterion DVD box set, 2012.
"The Ups and Downs of Jiri Menzel," M. S. Mason. The Christian Science Monitor, November 8, 1990.
World Film Directors Volume II: 1945-1985, ed. John Wakeman. The H.W. Wilson Company, 1988.
IMDb

By Sean Axmaker