Loves of a Blonde (1965) - Miloš Forman

Zruc is a small factory town in Czechoslovakia's dying manufacturing industry where the women factory workers outnumber the men by sixteen to one.  In such a competitive market, women find themselves desperately vying for any man's attention but the town beauty, Andula, has no shortage of men trying to woo her.  The women are excited when they hear news that the Czech Army will station soldiers in Zruc but that excitement quickly dissipates when they realize that the army sent reservists to town instead of the strapping young men they'd envisioned.

Loves of a Blonde is a simple story about a small town girl who falls for a guy from the big city.  The story is simple and one that happens all the time, but the film is shot like a slapstick comedy with satirical observations of human behavior throughout.  Within her predominantly female town, Andula is the beautiful girl that every man wants and while she pretends to be ignorant of her appeal to men, she's never above bragging about her latest love interest.  When she and her friends notice the middle-aged soldiers looking their way, the girls act bored and feign disinterest. "Oh God, I hope they don't send drinks over," they say, but then are disappointed when it appears that the men sent the table of women next to theirs a bottle of wine.  (This turns out to be a mistake and leads to one of the most cringe-worthy and yet, hilarious, sequences of the film.)

It isn't appropriate to call Andula "ungrateful" for her ultra-effective pheromones, but she definitely carries herself with a sense of entitlement...and how could she not?  Within her small town, she is the girl who has guys giving her diamond rings while the other girls haven't even seen a diamond in the flesh.  Days after she and Milda sleep together, she is confronted by this particular young man outside the factory and tells him to leave her alone but that she's keeping the ring because it was a gift.  Simply put, Andula is hot shit in this small town but when she meets Milda, she quickly learns that her appeal is not universal nor does it extend beyond the borders of Zruc.  Rather, within the context of a large city and options, she is in fact just an average pretty girl from a small town who gets played by a smooth talking metropolitan musician.

Forman's narrative is thoughtful and endearing while his direction proved to be stylistically influential to Czech New Wave cinema.  Forman experimented with shooting scenes where half of the characters were professional actors while the others' reactions were semi-improvisational.  This stylistic choice gives the film a distinct feeling of realness and the characters' interaction a sense of candidness.  When a table of young women notice that a table of middle aged men checking them out, both tables debate pretending not to notice the other.  Andula's first encounter with Milda, a jazz pianist from Prague, is as awkward as first meetings usually are and their reunion in Prague with his parents is even more cringe-worthy.  Forman's work was a visually striking piece of cinema with no scene more memorable than the post-coital scene between Milda and Andula.  Shot entirely from above, the scene is risque even by today's standard but the moment's intimacy makes the scene sexy, not the physical depiction of sex.

"...and you, you look like a guitar too, but one painted by Picasso."