Knoflíkáři (Buttoners) (1997), directed by Petr Zelenka
This
film, which is distantly reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch´s
Night on Earth (1991), examines parallels between interconnected events.
Knoflíkáři shows that our
knowledge of the events and narratives in which we take part is always
imperfect and partial. It is not within our power to encompass everything, hence our knowledge of the world always remains
incomplete. Zelenka likes ironic mystification which
he often presents to the viewer by means of mock documentaries.
Knoflíkáři consists of six, seemingly
independent chapters, but we soon realise that they are all closely interlinked
by mutually shared motifs as well as by cause and effect. The result of the
protagonist´s acting without sufficient knowledge about their situation is the
main theme of the film.
In the
first episode “Luck from Kokura”, the inhabitants of this Japanese town, according
to Zelenka, escape nuclear annihilation in August
1945 because the skies are cloudy, it is raining and the American pilots cannot
see where to drop the bomb. Their commanders tell them to change the course and
the atomic bomb then destroys Hiroshima. The citizens of Kokura paradoxically
escape death just at the moment when one of them, who had been to America,
teaches his friends how to swear about the weather, out of frustration that it
is always raining. (Allegedly, the Japanese language has no swearwords.) In the
second narrative “The Taxi Driver” a young couple hires a taxi because the young man can only make
love in a car when it is in motion. The attempt at lovemaking is unsuccessful
and the young couple leave. The next customer is a man who is going to 10 Lipanská Street to catch his wife in flagranti.
He is relieved to find out that there is an unknown woman in the bed in the
flat there. During the return to the city centre in the taxi, the customer is
happy that he has a faithful wife, but only the viewer knows that the woman in
the bed in the flat was the taxi driver´s wife and
that the customer´s wife was attempting sex in this very same the taxi driver´s
car with her young lover just a short while ago.
In the
next story “Civilised Habits” a fashionable, successful psychiatrist tries to
persuade an impractical and weak young man whose wife had left him to get out
of his depression by a strict observance of the basic norms of hygiene. Then, on a road at night, the psychiatrist´s car collides
with an oncoming vehicle with two young lovers in it. They think that they have just witnessed a suicide by an
unemployed man, a character who appears in the penultime
episode “Idiots” . He is a “Man who has not Contributed”
(i.e. his sperm for a US project of sending the sperm of elite males into
space). Frustrated after being criticized by his wife, he lies down on the
track before a train is due. He spits at the front of the engine, since, as he
says, he is the best spitter in the world.
In the
episode, entitled “The Last Decent Generation”, two middle-aged couples meet
for an evening meal in a suburban villa. Their children want to marry each
other. This narrative is an affectionate expression of
respect for human eccentricity: the middle-class father of the young boy has,
as a “buttoner”, an unsuppressible urge to snip
buttons off upholstered seats using a set of false teeth placed in between his
buttocks. The girl´s father loves putting
on a model of a Second World War fighter plane and running around in a mock-war
landscape where small explosions take place. The two couples become friends,
but they do not know that their children, the lovers from the previous episode,
are already dead after the car accident when their car collided with the
vehicle driven by the psychiatrist.
The last
episode “The Ghost of an American Pilot” is, in a slightly forced manner, trying to continue the story from
the first narrative of the film – a group of ten year old girls in Prague call up
“the ghost of the US pilot” who had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and
tell him how much evil he had committed. The pilot then does an interview for
Prague´s Radio 1 and asks the
public for forgiveness. He says he did not know what
he was doing. He is given absolution by telephone by the psychiatrist who had
just caused the death of two young people. Knoflíkáři
ends with a repeat of the explosion of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima: The
explosion stresses the main contention of the film that those who dropped the
bomb did not know alla the horrifying effects the
explosion would have – yet they dropped it. Acting without full knowledge of
the circumstances is the main theme of the film, which sees this
as typical of the human predicament.
The
restlessness in the film seems to reflect the experience of the Czech Republic
in the first years after the fall of communism.
The film
is full of restlessness. It seems that this reflects the experience of the
Czech Republic in the first years since the fall of communism – everything is
destabilised and in chaos. Insecurity is widespread. Everything is in motion.
Society is fragmented. Everyone is alone. Relationships, based on love and
trust, do not exist. The only couple in the film who
sincerely love each other, is killed.
Knoflíkáři also touches on the theme of
frustration and disintegration of marriage in middle age. One of the husbands
(acted by Jiří Kodet)
in the episode entitled “The Last Decent Generation” is a caricature of a
typical agressive Czech man in late middle age. These
men are deaf and blind to what is happening around them. The father of the
young girl is playing with planes. He says that “this excites us much more than
anything else”. But he speaks only for himself. He does not know what his wife
feels and makes fun of her for repeatedly screening a film of her daughter in
childhood.
Much of
what is going on in the film is unacceptable from a typical middle class
ethical point of view (for instance, the attempt at sex in a taxi). In the
destabilised Czech environment people are unfaithful to each other, morals do
not mean anything, local television stations uncritically rebroadcast absurd
American programmes, stupidity from the West is spreading
everywhere. Against each piece of information there is a piece of counter
information. People are forced to come to terms with this confusion somehow.
News comes from ever more and more doubtful sources. People are threatened by
unemployment under the new regime.
Middle
class professionals as well as working class people are trying to survive in
the chaos, but even the middle classes are lacking in self-confidence in the
new Czech Republic. The psychiatrist in Knoflíkáři
looks like a normal Western psychiatrist, he has an affluent flat which had
been obviously designed by an architect, owns paintings by contemporary artists
and has a decent car. But his tics, the fact that he constantly combs his hair
and uses a mouth spray, betray insecurity: the comb
and the spray turn this psychiatrist also into a caricature. If he had been a
stronger character, there would have been no car accident and the young lovers
would still be alive. The consequences are always the result of many
circumstances and if only one of them had been missing, tragedy would have been
avoided.
With the
exception of the “documentary” footage from Japan from August 1945 and the US
TV film about how American scientists have allegedly decided
to send sperm from 4 million men into space, the whole
of Knoflíkáři takes place at night. What
does the dark night sky mean? It contributes to the overall impression that the
film is a dream or a nightmare. Metaphorically, this supports the assertion of
the film that essential information remains hidden from us. If events take
place in darkness, we notice even fewer things than in daylight. Some events
would not have fatal consequences had they taken place during daylight.
Darkness symbolises our imperfect perception of the world around us.
As Jakub Žytek has pointed out, the
omnipresent darkness in this film can be seen as a metaphor of a collective subconsciousness which cannot function without complete
information about events and processes. Without access to the necessary
information about people´s motivation for their actions and without knowing why
particular consequences ensue, we can only be tolerant and forgive.
If we
accept this point of view, this gives meaning to the otherwise fairly incongruous
scene with the “return” of the US pilot in the second half of the film. The
psychiatrist, who has just caused the death of two young people in a car
accident and so has recent experience of what it means to be a “killer”, gives
him absolution. Naturally, the US pilot does not know what has motivated the
psychiatrist to forgive him. The taxi driver who
appears in several episodes in this movie, can be seen as a guide around this
collective subconsciousness.