[Revisit Review]
After all of these years, I'm still not sure what the appeal of Jiří Menzel's Closely Watched Trains is. It's a fragmentary film full of scenes so short they don't even pass for vignettes about the colorful people who live and work at the train station where the story takes place (my favorite being the Nazi collaborator who steadfastly insists that the Nazi's constant retreats are part of a grand scheme to conquer Europe). Here is a film with practically no overt agenda either political (although there are many who argue otherwise) or social. It's about a young man seeking to lose his virginity as the Second World War explodes around him. But perhaps that's where the film finds its charm: its obsession with the average details of everyday life in the face of extraordinary circumstances.
9/10
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