The film Closely Observed Trains, made in 1966, is a quietly subversive comedy, beautifully shot in crisp black-and-white, in which a workshy young guard at a remote train station in Czechoslovakia during the second world war is more concerned with losing his virginity than with throwing in his lot with either the occupying German forces or the resistance fighters.
It was directed with a charmingly light touch by Jiří Menzel, who has died aged 82 after a long illness. It established the simple rural milieu to which he would return repeatedly throughout his career and showed in its gently searching way that the personal can never be divorced from the political.
The film was a key work of the Czech new wave, and won the Academy Award for best foreign language film in 1968. During the Oscars telecast, Menzel was wrongly identified by the announcer, who mistook him for the Serbian director Aleksandar Petrović. Once on stage, he gave a nine-word acceptance speech (“I am very happy that Americans like Czech film”) before being escorted away by Danny Kaye. It resembled a scene from one of the director’s own absurdist, understated comedies.
Two years after Closely Observed Trains, Menzel made the equally delightful Capricious Summer (1968), which exuded a warming mix of nostalgia, whimsy and insight.
But he had little time to capitalise on his Oscar success. Four months after the ceremony, Russian tanks rolled into Prague and his career was, as he put it, “derailed”. While compatriots such as Miloš Forman and Ivan Passer fled to the US, Menzel stayed put. “I was the first Czech film-maker prevented from working and was only able to return to film-making in 1974,” he said. “It was only after some years and several more films that I felt I had returned to a position of prestige.” He kept himself busy directing theatre and acted prolifically in film and television.
Born in Prague, he was the son of Josef Menzel, a writer and translator, and Božena (nee Jindrichová), and grew up during the occupation. “As a five-year-old boy I remember being forced to do the Nazi Sieg Heil salute on the street,” he said. “I raised my left rather than right hand and my mother had to correct me.”
He had ambitions to be an actor but was rejected from drama school and ended up working in television and then studying at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU), where he met the director Vera Chytilová, among others; in 1963, he was an assistant on her film Something Different.
Menzel and Chytilová were among five film-makers who adapted short stories by the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal for the portmanteau feature Pearls of the Deep (1965). Menzel and Hrabal became friends and worked together, adapting Closely Observed Trains from the writer’s autobiographical novel. Menzel also turned Hrabal’s Larks on a String into a 1969 film, which was banned by the communist government for its portrait of bourgeois Czechs forced into re-education. It remained unreleased until 1990, when it was the joint winner of the Golden Bear prize at the Berlin film festival.
They also collaborated on the screenplays of Shortcuts (1981) and The Snowdrop Festivities (1984), both of which exhibited Menzel’s characteristic nostalgia for the ease of country life.
They shared a humane and inquisitive worldview. “Hrabal’s [perspective] influenced my own ideas about art a great deal,” he said. “I always admired in Hrabal the ability to look at people and see them as they truly are, with a truly uncompromising perspective, but he still loved people. He wasn’t a misanthrope after all that.”
Not all of Menzel’s films were known outside his home country, but My Sweet Little Village (1985), which was seen by more than a million Czechoslovakian cinemagoers, put him in the running for the Oscar for best foreign language film for the second time in his career, while his gentle satire The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (1994) received international distribution.
Like the film that had made his name, this was another tale of a mild-mannered innocent falling in love in a remote location. In its occasional outbreaks of slapstick, it displayed the director’s enduring love for the comedy of silent and early sound cinema.
He brought echoes of Chaplin also to I Served the King of England (2006), another adaptation of Hrabal’s work. Reviewing that movie, the New Yorker critic David Denby identified similarities between the film’s faintly bumbling hero, its Czech setting and Menzel himself. “The small country, like the small man, gets pushed around by bullies but survives through instinct and guile. It’s as if Menzel were celebrating not only Czech identity after the murderous 20th century but his own cunning and perseverance as an artist.”
Though Menzel made only one more picture, The Don Juans (2013), he was the subject in 2018 of a seven-and-a-half-hour documentary, CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel, which took its director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur eight years to complete and highlighted Menzel’s influence as well as his famous charm and decency.
“I only want to have one small ‘bourgeois’ theme – that being decent can be beautiful,” he said in 1987. Cinema, he insisted, could play its part in that. “People have such depressing lives that in films they should be stroked a little bit. One should help them a little bit to hold their heads up high.”
He is survived by his wife, the producer Olga Menzelová, whom he married in 2004, and their daughters, Anna Karolina and Eva Maria.
• Jiří Menzel, film director, born 23 February 1938; died 5 September 2020
