Filmmaker Jirí Menzel, pictured in Prague in February 2013.Doležal Michal / AP
"Serious things bore me a bit."
Whenever he could, Jirí Menzel released him in an interview, and assured that that had been his commandment in life.
That he had also had a bit of luck with the awards in life, and thus seemed to detract from his career, which nevertheless is one of the most brilliant in European cinema, and carried out in extremely turbulent times.
His death on Saturday at his home, announced the next day on Facebook by his wife and producer, Olga Menzelova, who said that since 2017 after brain surgery Menzel had chained health problems, thus closes the curriculum of a creator who loves satire , of irony in the face of great doubts in life and a master of the art of black comedy.
Among other awards, Jirí Menzel won the Oscar with
Rigorously Guarded Trains
(1966),
one of his six adaptations of works by the writer Bohumil Hrabal, and was again a candidate with
My Sweet Little Village
(1986).
Both
Rigorously Guarded Trains
and
Larks on the Wire
(1969) - which described life in a labor camp for young people accused of bourgeois behavior in the late 1940s - were banned in their country until the Velvet Revolution in 1989, which it ended decades of communist dictatorship.
This is why
Alondras en el wire
won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 1990. His last work released in Spain,
Yo serví al rey de Inglaterra
(2006), was also based on a novel by Hrabal, whom he met in 1964, when Together with other filmmakers, such as Vera Chytilová, another great of the new Czech cinema, they adapted several of his short stories in the episode film
Pearls in the bottom of the water
(1965), after graduating in Film Directing in 1962.
That's where that movement started, which gave its first stroke with the 1968 Oscar to
Rigorously Guarded Trains,
Menzel's solo debut in the feature film - he was 30 years old when he won the Hollywood award - starring a desperate train guard apprentice with his love failures in a train station in a small town (the building was real and in 2017 it became a museum), and that is why he decides to commit suicide before becoming a hero of the resistance against the Nazis.
"I would not have succeeded if it weren't for people like Milos Forman, Vera Chytilová and Jan Nemec, who gave Czech cinema an unexpected flight", and who had in common being a "natural reaction to the dishonesty of the preceding ideological films ”, He remembered in the promotion of
I Served the King of England.
Menzel, who was born in Prague in February 1938, decided to stay in his country after the entry of the Warsaw Pact tanks that ended the Prague Spring in August 1968, unlike Milos Forman, who preferred exile.
"I knew what my obligations were, and my duty was to stay there and make films for my compatriots," he recalled, without accusing Forman of anything.
"Hrabal and I are committed to continuing to do irony, telling life with comedies," said the filmmaker, who saw in this new Czech cinema "an escape from films marked by Bolshevik ideology and a commitment to a satirical point of view made from the same inside stories, not from outside ”.
And he finished: “Good comedy is about serious issues.
When you start talking seriously about serious things, you usually end up being ridiculed. "
In addition to his long career as a film director, which ended in 2013 with
Donsajni,
Jirí Menzel directed theater, was a film teacher (one of his students at the Prague Academy was Emir Kusturica), and acted in more than 70 audiovisual productions: In 2018 it was screened in a special session at the Berlinale
Without Oblivion,
which he co-starred with Peter Simonischek
(Toni Erdmann)
and which has become his last film.