I don't recall what circumstances led me to Karel Kachyna's Ucho; the movie is practically unknown. But I'm glad I watched it. I'm a fan of political cinema and think it's refreshing to see a movie condemning the Soviet Union.
Ucho has a simple, almost theatrical, plot: after a party, a couple return home and begin suspecting that people were at their home while they were gone. This suspicion, aggravated by the fact the husband is a Party officer and that he spent all night receiving innuendos about a purge within the Party that already cost the careers (and lives?) of several friends, explodes into a series of recrimination between himself and his tipsy wife about their private life.
The movie shows how easily the state could affect the private life in the Soviet Union, how people were on edge and constantly paranoid and why they had good motives to be paranoid. In a scene that certainly inspired Francis Ford Coppola in The Conversation, the couple goes around the house looking for bugs in every room. In The Conversation Harry Caul doesn't find any; in Ucho there's one in every room, so obscenely obvious it's like the secret police doesn't even care if the couple knows their existence. After all, what could they do about it? Complain to the police? This movie is theatrical because it's concentrated inside a house, in spite of some well-timed flashbacks to the party. But it's also theatrical because of its use of dialogue. This is one of those movies, like Sleuth, like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, where acting coupled with fierce, witty dialogue carries the narrative along.
It's fascinating to see Ludvik (Radoslav Brzobohatý) and Anna (Jirina Bohdalová) torn each other apart in petty accusations, with the fear of arrest looming over their heads. A movie like this would need two good performances to work, and the actors, although they're not famous, are up to the task and provide the movie's emotional core.
Karel Kachyna and screenwriter Jan Procházka deserve praise for this study of life in the Soviet Union.
Ucho has a simple, almost theatrical, plot: after a party, a couple return home and begin suspecting that people were at their home while they were gone. This suspicion, aggravated by the fact the husband is a Party officer and that he spent all night receiving innuendos about a purge within the Party that already cost the careers (and lives?) of several friends, explodes into a series of recrimination between himself and his tipsy wife about their private life.
The movie shows how easily the state could affect the private life in the Soviet Union, how people were on edge and constantly paranoid and why they had good motives to be paranoid. In a scene that certainly inspired Francis Ford Coppola in The Conversation, the couple goes around the house looking for bugs in every room. In The Conversation Harry Caul doesn't find any; in Ucho there's one in every room, so obscenely obvious it's like the secret police doesn't even care if the couple knows their existence. After all, what could they do about it? Complain to the police? This movie is theatrical because it's concentrated inside a house, in spite of some well-timed flashbacks to the party. But it's also theatrical because of its use of dialogue. This is one of those movies, like Sleuth, like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, where acting coupled with fierce, witty dialogue carries the narrative along.
It's fascinating to see Ludvik (Radoslav Brzobohatý) and Anna (Jirina Bohdalová) torn each other apart in petty accusations, with the fear of arrest looming over their heads. A movie like this would need two good performances to work, and the actors, although they're not famous, are up to the task and provide the movie's emotional core.
Karel Kachyna and screenwriter Jan Procházka deserve praise for this study of life in the Soviet Union.