Jízda (The Ride), 1994, directed by Jan Svěrák
This
"cult" Czech movie can be interpreted as a generational statement
about the predicament of thirty-year-olds who had reached maturity under
"really existing socialism" (communism) in Czechoslovakia and were
outsiders within that regime. They remain helpless and without being able to
act in the post-communist society. Exactly
because they are the children of "normalisation" (the 1970s and the
1980s, a period of stagnation, which followed
after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion and the subsequent political clampdown),
they lack "assertiveness" and "aggression", which is needed
in the "new times".
The age
around thirty tends to be a time of personal disillusionment. This was felt
particularly strongly under the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. At thirty
you realised that your job was a prison and that
you would not be able to do anything meaningful unless you collaborated
politically with the regime. The anarchism and freedom of your younger years
were gone: The thirty-year old man had to support his family, at home he was
yelled at by his overworked and neurotic wife. Only the last ideal still
remained – and even this one was now difficult to achieve – an escape to a
hiking trip, to the magic, healing, hot Czech countryside in summer.
Both
heroes of Jízda, Franta
a Radek, are examples of these disillusioned
thirty-year-olds. They are trying to escape life in the new post-communist
society, in which they obviously cannot find a proper job (they do not even
have money to purchase a real car) and go back
to the time when they were around twenty. into a road
movie, just for a few days. An idyll has always been a salvation to Czechs
in trouble, since the times of Božena Němcová´s national classic, the novel Babička (Granny) (1855). They want to
pretend that they are not "old" and want to indulge in the magic of
the hot summer countryside. Their journey through the hot sunny days in the
South Bohemian countryside is to have a therapeutic effect on them. The beauty of the countryside is for Czechs a typical palliative
for all their insoluble problems.
But of
course, imitating an endless "coast-to-coast" ride, which can take
place in the United States, in terms of South Bohemia is absurd – in the small
Czech Republic, you reach the border in any direction within several hours. The
protagonists cannot go abroad because the vehicle which they have obtained at a
scrap yard does not have papers. And, anyway, bursting out from the Czech
environment would be inappropriate at this stage – the heroes need the
experience of escaping from everyday life, but they need to stay within their
own native country. They have problems assimilating this experience,
the outside world would be too much.
The
protagonists decide that they will only travel on minor roads (i.e.: their existence
is inauthentic, the world does not accept it, they are
not independent, fully-fledged members of society who can ride on any roads. They are marginalised) –
because they do not have documents for the car. They compensate for their
helplessness by pretending, playing a game. However, the film warns that the
palliative effect of Jízda is false. Yet the
only possible solution is playing games out of time since the protagonists are
emasculated as a result of what they had experienced. So, no matter how we look
at it, the protagonists remain at a dead end – what remains is just the
temporary illusion of the beautiful summer.
Franta and Radek do a
"good deed" at the beginning of the film (they give a short lift to
an old lady with a rake, going from the fields back to the village) and so they
receive a "reward" – they find a girl, Aňa,
a provocative erotic symbol, at a roadside in
the forest. Using her sixth sense, Aňa
knows immediately that both men desire her (Franta is
trying to control himself, he is married), but they are powerless, they simply
do not dare to court her properly. Aňa flirts
with both of them outrageously all the time because it is clear to her that
nothing will happen. "You are not up to this," she says to Radek at one point.
The changes
in contemporary life in the Czech Republic taking place before the eyes of
the "aging young men" are out of control
and unstoppable. Radek reads a newspaper and is
surprised that journalists now measure the scale of things using a credit card
– until now, they used to use a matchbox! Such a matchbox with a sign
Made in Czechoslovakia is brutally discarded at the end of the film. This may
mean that that Czechoslovakia, in which both men have grown up, no longer exists, it has become an alien society. It can also mean
that Franta and Radek are
resigned to the fact that it might ever be
possible for them to integrate within the new society.
Instead,
they just play games – they pretend that they are in a road movie, they
pretend that they are trying to seduce the girl, they pretend that they have
robbed a bank, that they have broken into someone´s second home in the
country. (Radek, once he entres
the house, hides his own photograph – the
cottage is his.) They want to look like grown-up, real men, but they don´t know
how to be such characters. Jízda´s
protagonists belong to the gallery of useless Czech "vagrant
outsiders". To engage with life in the new era would mean to be like Honzík, Aňa´s lover who
pursues them along the South Bohemian roads in a luxury, expensive and modern
black car. Honzík is a successful, agressive enterpreneur – Aňa
says of him, "He takes what he wants".
But, the
film warns in conclusion, engaging in the aggressive behaviour in the "new
society" is not a solution. At the end of the film, Franta
and Radek see a car accident. (Fatal road
accidents are frequent in the Czech Republic.) Aňa
and Honzík are dead. Aňa
has tried to repeat, in Honzík´s car, the risky
action which had worked on a previous occasion – to lock the steering wheel and
let the car run downhill out of gear. In an illusion, in a fairytale with two
men who live in a bubble of unreality, it was possible to do this. In the world
of assertive businessman´s actions a risky deed leads to death, warns Jízda, a film which studies certain aspects of male
and female mentality and is a general statement on futility and the value of
escape.