The Fireman's Ball DVD

This key film of the Czech New Wave has been unavailable on the UK for far too long. Michael Brooke dives into its heady mix of comedy and social history.

One of the best-loved Czech New Wave classics, this was the film that earned Milos Forman a ticket to Hollywood and future Oscar glory, though at home it was formally "banned forever" by the Czech authorities (one of just four films given that impressive distinction), which assumed that it was an allegory about their misrule.  They weren't the only ones to detect a political subtext: in the 1990s, inspired by one of the film's best-known set-pieces, the verb 'zhastnout' ("to switch off the lights") became a popular slang term to describe the asset-stripping that plagued the country in the years immediately following the Velvet Revolution.

However, Forman always claimed that the film had no more ambition than being a more or less accurate recreation of a memorably chaotic event that he and his co-writers personally attended in the provincial town of Vrchlabi, seeking to drown their sorrows after another project collapsed. Indeed, so keen was Forman to recapture the experience that he ended up casting the film almost entirely from the ranks of actual Vrchlabi firemen and townspeople (who loved the end result), plus bandmaster-turned-actor Jan Vostrcil, a reassuringly familiar face from most of Forman's Czech output.  

Starting from the knockabout opening sequence, in which an over-zealous investigation into petty theft triggers a series of slapstick collisions worthy of Buster Keaton, the celebrations of a veteran fireman's 86th birthday (they missed the 85th, and are worried that he might not make the 87th) rapidly degenerate into a near-riot, not helped by a real fire breaking out at a time when the firemen are in no position to do anything about it.

The film's notorious centrepiece is a disastrous beauty contest populated by the decidedly plain offspring of ill-advisedly pushy mothers (the mothers of the real beauties having wisely stopped them from competing), the judging of which plumbs toe-curling levels that even Ricky Gervais might baulk at matching.  What makes all this not just irresistibly entertaining but also strangely touching is Forman's quizzical, sympathetic eye: everyone behaves badly, but more out of warped solidarity with their comrades than any innate malice.

Michael Brooke on 29th July 2009
Author of 137 reviews