Film 2
KnoflIkari translates as Buttoners, and this Czech film's press release helpfully explains that it is "a black comedy about spitting at trains, about bad weather, about shooting dried sperm into the Andromeda constellation, about dropping the atom bomb". Such lists are invariably a bad sign, warning you that the film is hopelessly diffuse, harbours philosophical ambitions and is probably too long. But with Buttoners, the blurb makes sense - this devious portmanteau is certainly diffuse and whimsical, but keeps heading in unexpected directions. Miraculously, it achieves an almost impossible combination for smart comedy, managing to be amiable and unsettling in equal measure.
We don't hear much these days about what's happening in Czech cinema, apart from the slow-germinating works of surrealist animator Jan Svankmajer and the anarchic sentimentalism of Jan Sverak, who scored internationally with the saccharine Kolya. But Buttoners suggests there might be a healthy new current of weird invention. The film is credited to "Peter Zelenka and his friends" and it is an equitable, sprawling enterprise, its large cast mixing known names such as Rudolf Hrusinsky (a regular in Jiri Menzel's films) with non-professionals including rock singers, artists, academics and film industry people.
Buttoners is a brilliant refutation of the pernicious three-act dogma of script construction. Like Pulp Fiction, only more so, the film doubles back, skips time zones, crosses narrative lines and leaves you thoroughly confused and exhilarated. Skipping from the Japanese town of Kokura on a fateful day in August 1945 to Prague exactly 40 years later, the narrative seems to work on the principle of temporal puns, if that concept makes any sense.
In a series of sketches, a group of Kokura residents lament the difficulty of cursing in Japanese; a taxi driver-cum-make-up artist gives rides to an amorous couple and a jealous husband; a fussy psychiatrist browbeats a patient about the importance of combing your hair; a grumpy couple argue over a TV programme about sperm in space. And so on. The final episode plaits the threads into an intricate philosophical loop, as if all along everything had really been happening simultaneously.
Throughout, the six supposedly discrete stories are riddled with coincidences, parallels, nudges to make us infer other connections (is it really possible that everyone in Prague that night ends up hailing the same taxi?). In fact, you can imagine 100 ways that the narrative could fork off in other unexplored directions, following the other characters encountered along the way.
Buttoners is an object lesson in how a film can be ambitious and hugely entertaining at the same time. Zelenka doesn't really do anything widely irregular - his episodes, neatly divided up under individual titles, are models of concision, each with a classic O Henry-style twist. But it's the way they interlock and cancel each other out that's really fiendish. And each occupies a different register - from morbid moral comedy ("Civilisation") to surreal Bunuelesque dismantling of bourgeois manners ("The Last Decent Generation") or a boisterous duel of non sequiturs, featuring a character best described as the Czech answer to Homer Simpson.
It's a very cinephile film, too. The references to Jiri Menzel and Closely Observed Trains are explicit, but what other in-jokes it contains about Czech film history we can only guess at. We'll have to settle for recognising that the cab sequences not only echo Taxi Driver but also feel like the missing Prague episode from Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth. And the taxi driver's dangling pendant, a thread between the stories, could be an irreverent reference to the car ornament in that altogether more sombre episode, Kieslowski's Short Film about Killing.
I've never been to Prague, but Buttoners feels as though it could be one of those city-portrait films that get their place and moment dead-on. It is well worth seeking out - a minor film but satisfying and subversive in the way that only independent minor films seem to manage.
"Buttoners" opens at the ICA on 15 January and continues on selected dates until 28 January
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