This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week's theme is movies not in English, which is a fairly easy theme, with only needing to check whether or not I'd used the movies in a previous Thursday Movie Picks. With that in mind, here's my theme-within-a-theme picks:
Closely Watched Trains (1966). Directed by the recently deceased Jiří Menzel, the movie tells the story of Miloš, an apprentice dispatcher at a station in a middle of nowere part of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. He's worried about becoming a man due to his sexual inadequacy, but has the chance to show what he's made of when there's a plot to sabotage the Nazis involving his station.
The Confession (1970). Based on the true story of Arthur London, a Czech Communist who was purged, tortured, and subjected to a show trial in the early 1950s, Yves Montand plays the man being arrested for a political crime he didn't commit. The movie is long and brutal, but worth a watch.
The Ear (1970/1990). Equally brutal but in a different way, this one tells the story of a junior minister (Radoslav Brzobohatý) in the Foreign Ministry and his wife (Jiřina Bohdalová) who return home from a function to find the power off, which leads them to believe the house has been bugged in advance of another Party purge. The couple then descend into madness trying to find the bug. This was made after the Soviet invasion that ended the Prague Spring of 1968, so I'll never know how it even got made in that oppressive environment; unsurprisingly, it didn't see release until 1990, after the fall of Communism. Despite the difficult subject matter, this one is also extremely worth a watch if you can find it.
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