Loves of a Blonde

LOVES OF A BLONDE   ***1/2

Miloš Forman

1965

IDEA:  An error in central planning leaves a provincial Czech town with a population where women far outnumber men. To pair the women up and improve their productivity at work, the government organizes a dance attended by aging reservists.

BLURB:  Like so many of the most exemplary films of the Czechoslovak New Wave, Loves of a Blonde is a pithy, deceptively jovial scherzo of social satire, a romp of an allegory that regards the quirks and cruelties of the Communist State through a laughing sneer. Forman, perhaps the most blatantly funny director of the eclectic movement, is particularly sly at getting his ideological licks in under the guise of a party: specifically, in Loves of a Blonde, the harebrained, state-sponsored mating game orchestrated to match lonely factory girls with eligible army reservists. An absurdly contrived solution to a bureaucratic blunder, the party plays out as an almost runaway farce, the bumbling soldiers effecting a chain reaction of faux pas while their targets desperately look the other way for more desirable bachelors. The upbeat atmosphere of the scene, like so much in the film, leaves a sardonic burn; as his characters fumble and cavort, holding to a promise of sexual escape, Forman never lets the audience forget the boondoggle of this authoritarian effort to foster love and labor. The strained attempt to regulate the volatile factor of sexuality, specifically women’s, thus becomes the joke and tragedy of Loves of a Blonde, the catalyst for both Andula’s quixotic romantic odysseys and her emotional deprivation. Nothing quite so succinctly encapsulates this tragicomic juxtaposition as when Forman cuts from Andula’s would-be sweetheart, comically squeezed into the bed of his bickering parents, to the spurned girl, weeping outside the family’s door. The world of Loves of a Blonde doesn’t accommodate connubial bliss; its only bedfellows are youthful idealism and its dashed dreams, the hope for release and the reality of a system that doesn’t allow many places to go.