March 6: Martyrs of Love/Mucedníci lásky (1967 -- Jan Němec)

★★★★★

Here is a beautiful little film in the mannered, sweet vocabulary of the silent era, a film that invests in that vocabulary and uses it to communicate rather than taking it just as a formal affectation.  Jan Němec uses sentimentality, gentle irony, caricature and slapstick humor to characterize his three martyrs of love and create a gentle yet experimental portrait of lovable characters who fail at love.

Martyrs of Love consists of three stories.  In the first, The Junior Clerk’s Temptation, a nerdy office worker finds himself restless and unable to stay at home one evening and decides to go out on the town in search of excitement.  With his black jacket, white gloves and bowler, the clerk echoes Charlie Chaplin, and he has some of the hapless Little Tramp’s ineptness.  Naturally, he’s widely ignored at the bars until they close, at which point a woman asks him if he has any liquor at home.  She and two friends go to his place to party, drink his alcohol, and one couple has passionate sex while the clerk’s woman passes out.  It's just what would happen to the Little Tramp.

In Němec’s hands, though, The Junior Clerk’s Temptation goes beyond the conventions of silents.  As the clerk is initially restless at home, visions of leggy women preoccupy him as a whining jazz score animates the scene, and the film quickly takes the narrative pace of a boozy night on the town.  Miroslav Ondrícek’s black-and-white cinematography exploits the sparkle of artificial light and scenes of choreographed dancing to create images of the bohemian nightlife that attract the clerk.  But of course, for all the allure of that life, the clerk ends up back at his office the next day with only his dreams and memories.

The same mix of dreamy whimsy informs Anastasia’s Dream, the tale of the second martyr. Němec’s wit is

quickly apparent in this section.  In contrast to the male clerk dressed in black, the woman here wears a white dress.  And rather than jazz in a nightclub, we encounter classical music in an elegant, baroque palace.  In keeping with the thematic continuity of the film, though, the innocent maid Anastasia can only gaze longingly at her beloved soprano soloist, discovering awkwardly soon after the performance that he already has a companion.  The mood of this section is dreamlike throughout, from the quiet soundtrack in the palace to the surreal narrative as Anastasia jilts the officer at her military wedding finds herself seduced by a gypsy with a guitar on the train.  Reality intrudes at the end of section as she comes full circle as a server with a tray on a train.  The section has the marvelous cohesion of a reverie.

While the clerk wears black and Anastasia white, the main character of the third section, Orphan Rudolf’s Adventure, wears grey.  This meta-cinematic costuming highlights the cinematic self-conscious throughout Martyrs of Love.  In this third section, it’s the silents’ slapstick humor that predominates.  Chaos reigns as a family plays musical instruments badly, chases each other, trips over each other and breaks records over each other’s heads.  The merriment is so great that that when the family discovers that the man they thought was Jacob is, in fact, the orphan Rudolf, they burst into laughter and continue their celebration.  On imagines that, for an orphan, finding such a family would be wonderful, but since Martyrs of Love is about loss as portrayed in the sweet sentimentality of silent film language, Rudolf eventually finds himself alone again.

Martyrs of Love doesn't end with the final story.  Instead,  first the clerk, then Anastasia, appear and walk slowly up a hill to join the disappointed Rudolf.  Black, white and grey assemble and then walk off together into a woods.  In this way, this wonderful tribute to the power of silent film gives us a fitting end to Němec’s experimental appropriation of the language.