Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion [1970] – A Italian Political Satire of the Highest Order

Elio Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) is a grotesque, political satire that seems to be cut from the same cloth of Kafka’s parable. Our essential notion of law is based on the general principle of equality and non-discrimination. But what if ‘law’ is just another institution which castigates humanity and is driven by norms and rules closely linked to fascist ideology? Law as an iron fist institution will only uphold hegemony and pat on the back of a rigidly structured ideology. In such a scenario, the ones with a power to (legally) judge will always be placed out of the bureaucratically enforced rules and norms. The powerful figures of bureaucracy become the noble class, enjoying their exclusive access to law to perpetually repress the common citizens.   

Petri’s incendiary political drama, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is based on this particular idea that some citizens are above suspicion. It’s just like the famous quote in Orwell’s Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more than equal.” The film, nevertheless, opens like a conventional crime genre film. Adorned by Ennio Morricon’s flamboyant musical score, in the opening frames we see a man discreetly entering his mistress’ Roman apartment. He kills her with a disposable razor during sex. But uncharacteristically, the killer starts leaving ample clues to implicate him in the crime. He leaves finger and foot-prints all over the crime scene. He leaves a large sum of money for the investigators to strike off robbery as a motive. Furthermore, he leaves a loose thread of his lavender silk-tie in one of the murdered woman’s sharp nails.

Before leaving the crime scene, the man makes an anonymous call to the homicide department. Finally, while leaving the apartment building, he walks out in the presence of a young man, a ploy to secure a witness. Later in the narrative, a homicide detective tells his department chief, “The killer must be an idiot”. The chief agrees, “Yes, an idiot”. But the detective doesn’t know that his chief (Gian Maria Volonte) is that killer. Of course, the unnamed sociopathic chief has killed his lover, Augusta Terzi (Florinda Bolkan) to absolutely prove his hypothesis that he is ‘above suspicion’. The narrative brilliantly and viciously chronicles the chief’s power trip, starting from his return to the crime scene, now as an investigator, and he once again touches everything in the apartment.

Elio Petri often cuts to flash-backs, recounting his days with Augusta. Augusta Terzi is clearly fascinated by the power the chief of homicide department withholds. His affair with Augusta gradually leads to erotic games based on staging of murder scenarios. This explains the film’s opening exchange between Augusta and the chief: “How are you going to kill me this time?”, she teasingly asks, to which the man replies, “I’m going to slash your throat” and then embraces her. The fetish for staging and photographing the homicide scenarios reflects the protagonist’s infantilism and psychosexual conflict, which he effortlessly masks in the public by being a traditional patriarchal figure to the lawmen, relentlessly exuding macho attitudes.

In fact, apart from wickedly testing the boundaries of his power, the chief kills Augusta because her fascination with his power gradually wanes, and she expresses contempt over his sexual inadequacy and arrested sexual development. He thinks that by teasing his sexual shortcomings, she has indirectly derided his authority. Hence that becomes the hidden motive, which becomes clear as the protagonist causes more chaos. On a broad scale, Petri uses the chief’s pre-occupation with power to examine how the system of law deems which citizens are ‘above suspicion’ and which citizens are the ‘natural suspects’. After striking out Augusta’s husband’s involvement in the murder, the police considers her upstairs neighbor, Antonio Pace (Sergio Tramonti), a young anarchist, the same man who had ‘accidentally’ seen the inspector chief leaving the crime scene.

 Nevertheless, the chief doesn’t want an innocent person to take his place. As he argues to himself, “if you send an innocent man to prison in your place, then the fact that you're above suspicion has not been proven.”  So, he wants the officials above and below him (in the power ladder) to know he is the culprit and yet be absolved of his crime (because he’s ‘above suspicion’). Director Petri wants to showcase that in an authoritarian power structure, the ones who are legally deemed as ‘guilty’ has nothing to do with committing a crime, but they are unlucky to fall under the parameters (grounded in social status, ideology, and race) of guilt.

This is splendidly emphasized in a scene the inspector chief delivers a thunderous monologue, addressed to his colleagues, increasingly blurring the lines between criminal activities and democratic expression of dissent. He equates a bank robbery with subversives involved in strikes and sit-ins: “They both have the same objective. They just use different methods. Their objective is to overthrow the current social order.” This insightful trip into the mind of a power-wielding fascist ends on a thoughtful note. He proclaims: “Let others take up the task of healing and educating. Our duty is to repress them! Repression is our vaccine! Repression is civilization!”

Although Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion opens as a traditional crime film, it is much more than a narrative about a powerful man getting away with murder. It was both a timely as well as timeless exploration of how authoritarian power works and thinks. In the film’s beginning, the unnamed chief of homicide department is promoted as the chief of political intelligence. Augusta Terzi’s murder happens on his last day in homicide. Political Section is ostensibly engaged in a bigger operation, wiretapping thousands of alleged ‘subversives’, ‘anarchists’, and ‘leftists’. While walking through a long corridor of files (collected through eavesdropping and wiretapping) and entering into a room consisting of a wall-length computer (that instantly searches for the files on subversives), the chief’s lust for power reaches a crescendo (he gleefully shouts, “America has arrived!”).

Elio Petri and his co-writer Ugo Pirro’s acerbic portrait of corruption and fascism were considered timely because it perfectly reflected the actual political situation in Italy in the late 1960s. In the Senses ofCinema article (by Gino Moliterno), it is mentioned that when Petri privately screened the film for his contemporaries Mario Monicelli and Ettore Scola, though they were enthusiastic about the film, they also agreed to the possibility that Petri is going to end up in prison. In the wonderful Criterion essay (by Evan Calder Williams), I learnt how Petri throughout his short career (he made only 12 films and prematurely died of cancer at the age of 53), was reprimanded by both the studios and far-left critics (one side feeling Petri is too political, whereas the other side lambasting him for not being deeply political).

Yet despite the widespread political unrest of the time and the vitriolic critique from the far-left, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion was the single biggest successful film in Petri’s career, reaping both awards and blockbuster status. The film won two awards at Cannes (Jury Prize and International Critics’ Prize), and eventually got the Best Foreign Academy Award (while it was also nominated for ‘Best Original Screenplay’).

Alongside Investigation and the two films Petri made immediately after it – The Working Class Goes to Heaven (1971) and Property Is No Longer a Theft – they came to be collectively known as ‘Trilogy of Neurosis’. The inspector chief at one point in the narrative states, “It’s a disease I probably contracted from my prolonged use of power. It’s an occupational disease.” As the Sense of Cinema article emphasizes, if 'Investigation' “had been an exploration of the neurosis of power, The Working Class Goes to Heaven was meant to explore the neurosis of work, while Property is No Longer a Theft (1973) caustically satirized the desire for property and money as pathological.”

Like any stories dealing with infallibility of law and bureaucracy, 'Investigation' is riddled with Kafkaesque strains. In fact, Petri ends the film with Kafka’s quote (from his 1915 novel ‘Before the Law’): “Whatever he may seem to us, he is yet a servant of the Law; that is, he belongs to the Law and as such is set beyond human judgment.” Just like what Kafka does with his pointed tales, Petri makes a critique of power and reveals the obscure mechanisms (largely invisible to the common populace) essential to keep rolling the wheels of hegemony. Eventually, apart from Petri’s clear-eyed direction, Investigation’s success and impact is multiplied due to Volonte’s emblematic central performance.  The perverse delight with which he flaunts his culpability and his earsplitting speeches perfectly realizes a fascistic creature.

Overall, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (115 minutes) is a grim allegory on the nature of unchecked power and authority that isn’t far removed from the political realities of the present. Elio Petri employs absurdist, satirical narrative tone to make us face the hard truths about the 'true' status of law that’s both unsettling as well as thought-provoking. 

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City Zero [1988] – An Uncanny Absurdist Discourse on the Soviet Reality

Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascension to power in 1985 as the General Secretary of the Communist Party led to the policy of Perestroika, which was an attempt to revitalize Soviet Union economy. Another Gorbachev policy is that of Glasnost, which sought reforms like governmental transparency and freedom of speech. Nevertheless, the policies didn’t rectify the stagnation in economy or decentralize the power, leading to the unforeseen collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Now historians perceive the Brezhnev’s rule (1964-82) as the Era of Stagnation, while perestroika and glasnost period supposed to have seen through the lies and illusions of social stability and economic progress broadcasted by the Soviet high command. The social and political thought of those years (mid to late 1980s) is presented through a fantastical and comically absurd scenario in Karen Shakhnazarov’s City Zero (‘Gorod Zero aka ‘Zerograd’, 1988).

City Zero opens at one hazy, beautiful predawn morning in a deserted railway station with a lone man getting off the train. The man is an engineer from Moscow named Aleksei Varakin (Leonid Filatov). The provincial backwater town is unnamed and Varakin takes up a taxi to the hotel. The gloomy, empty spaces foreshadow the succession of unusual events and the subsequent entrapment of Varakin. As our middle-aged protagonist pays visit to the town’s air-conditioner manufacturing industry to negotiate regarding panel design with the factory director, he comes across a young secretary sitting naked before the typewriter. The woman’s nakedness isn’t noticed by anyone but Varakin. The factory director’s (Armen Dzhigarkhanyan) behavior is also strange as he calls for his chief engineer who has been dead for eight months. Moreover, the meeting ends on an unproductive note. Varakin decides to take the evening train back to Moscow, and visits a restaurant for lunch in which he is the lone diner.

Things get increasingly weird as the waiter brings a cake for dessert which Varakin didn’t order. The cake is the mirror image of Varakin’s head. Suddenly a musical troupe starts playing and the waiter slices up the cake to offer it to his only customer. Varakin refuses to eat and pays off the bill. The waiter warns if he doesn’t eat the cake, the chef might shoot himself. Varakin doesn’t pay attention to this bizarre warning and makes to the door when he hears a gunshot. The chef seems to have shot himself. Varakin is summoned by the police. From then on our hapless hero is caught under the illogical Kafkaesque social system of the place which demands Varakin to never leave the place.

The narrative’s series of bewildering segments includes a jaunt through an underground makeshift museum (that was once a coal mine) of the town’s idealized past. From Troy, Attila the Hun to Gulag and young Stalin, the museum curator highlights (in a deadpan manner) the whole span of Soviet history that's somehow absurdly rewritten to strongly link it to the town. The museum also pays tribute to rock-and-roll, displaying the figures of the first couple in town, who were bold enough to dance to ‘Rock Around the Clock’ (the fates of those two, of course, turned bleak after this incident) during the 1957 youth festival. Furthermore, the museum and later the writer Chugunov (Oleg Basilashvili), head of local writers’ organization, informs Vakarin of an ongoing political feud between members of the Stalinist past and others trying to catch up with the modernity as promised by Western nations. Naturally, the feud only adds to Varakin’s confusion (obviously a symbolic figure representing the Soviet public) and eventually we once again see him alone, adrift in an oar-less boat on a fog-bound river.  

Writer/director Karen Shakhnazarov and his co-writer Aleksandr Borodyanskiy view the shockingly absurd atmosphere as the consequence of constant upheavals in Soviet society. Influenced by ‘Gogolian’ humor and ‘Kafkaesque’ existential despair, director Shakhnazarov vibrantly stages each of Vakarin’s inexplicable troubles without ever depleting the comic energy in the narrative. The writing repeatedly hints at an objective reality, full of pretense and deception. For instance, the subjective perspective of Varakin is often at odds with the collective objectivity: only he is confounded by the naked secretary or the cake that resembles his face or the re-engineered past dispersed throughout the museum. This unsettling as well as preposterous picture of the community certainly offers a definitive comment on Soviet political and cultural upheaval.

Furthermore, the premise offers an exploration of a past and present that’s emptied out of substance or meaning. Each of the enactments, bathed under flashlights and a overstated carnival score, plus the writer’s recollection of the town’s alleged historical significance deems to propagate a sense of deification (from Prince Dmitry Donskoy to rock ‘n’ roll) with zero meaning. If the town’s first rock ‘n’ roll performance (in 1957) carried a message of revolt, the jubilant mood in the present-time rock ‘n’ roll club (of 1980s) looks like a vacuous affair. The beautiful, young woman who danced with Nikolayev (seen in an energetic flashback sequence) visits Varakin at his hotel room, now a heavy woman with coarse features and literally robbed off her voice. She says (her son reads what she writes) Nikolayev has kept the ideals alive. But under the weight of political tyranny and disoriented truths, the ‘ideals’ seems to have worn out.

From a directorial perspective too, Karen Shakhnazarov amplifies the satirical nature of the scenarios (I am looking forward to repeat viewings to unearth many of the aesthetic treatments). Take the scene when Varakin is visited by various members of the town, each entering the room under different pretexts. They drink some beer, share dumplings, and sing a melody. The foundational notions of Soviet socialism comes alive for a brief time, before they all leave the room to pursue after a dubious historical story related to Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy and an ancient oak tree. The visuals in the very last scene also vibrate with meaning: we see the museum curator gradually switches off the lights adoring the sugary re-enactments, leaving it to darkness (sums up what has to be done with this manufactured falsities) while Varakin drifts off into the mist (the absence of oar in the boat may underlines the atmosphere of hopelessness or uncertainty).

Overall, City Zero (103 minutes) is an engrossing sociopolitical allegory on the waning days of Soviet Union.  

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Downsizing [2017] – A High-Concept Sci-Fi Comedy that Fizzles Out in Execution

The first 40 minutes of Alexander Payne’s Downsizing (2017) is nothing short of spectacular. It starts off as an ambitious sci-fi that satirically jabs at white privilege, mass consumption, social inequality, environmental degradation, etc. Taking into account the previous commendable works of Mr. Payne, the master satirist of American society (to say exactly, the Midwestern culture), it is natural to expect him to address the intriguingly laid-out premise and themes with great depth and alacrity. But the narrative doesn’t quite take a leap, laboriously hopping from one idea to another without fully exploring any single one. What’s more conspicuously missing in Downsizing is Payne’s trademark acerbic wit and profound display of human empathy.

Alexander Payne and his regular co-writer Jim Taylor deserves praise for crafting a studio feature that tackles the inevitability of global warming and ponders upon the fundamental inequalities, regardless of humankind’s noble intentions and higher ideals.  At least for the first hour or so, Payne and Taylor explore their preoccupations with vigor and acute observations which gradually broadens our marvel about this sci-fi premise. A genial Norwegian scientist named Dr. Asbjornsen (Rolf Lassgard) invents a method to shrink human beings to about five inches. For half a decade, he and handful of people shrink themselves and lead a life without worrying much about carbon footprint. The scientists’ findings revealed in a surprising press conference: a tiny man at a tiny podium, placed above a normal-sized podium addresses the dumbfounded macro humans. The goal of the shrinking, of course, is presented as a way to curb climate change, as Dr. Asbjornsen’s ‘big’ colleague reveals how a tiny colony of people’s waste (for 5 yrs) could be fit into large plastic bag. Within the next few years, shrinking becomes both a lifestyle craze and ‘save-our-planet’ advocacy.

Few years later this technology has been fully commodified in America. Old people consider retirement in the form of tiny person, since being full-sized doesn’t bring much luxury. Moreover, a good portion of Middle-class Americans are coaxed to downsize themselves through freshly inaugrated lilliputian utopian communities. When one is just five inches tall (0.0364 percent the size of their full-sized counterparts), everything including food and material needs, gets smaller. Not only one could save the planet, but by trading their limited nest eggs, middle-class families could lead a life of great wealth in downsized worlds. Moreover, being small doesn’t affect citizenship or right to vote. At least that’s what the brochures of different tiny communities say. Of course, before consenting to miniaturization one should also understand that there’s no way to reverse the process. All such intrigues of the commoditized scientific invention are gracefully observed through the perspective of Paul Safranek (Matt Damon), a physical therapist and an average-American nice guy and his bored, irresolute wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig).

The pressure of taking care of (now-deceased) mom has affected Paul’s pre-med studies. He’s only an low-paid occupational therapist and hasn’t been able to buy his wife Audrey the home of their dreams. Taking the words of a recently downsized friend, the couple visits ‘Leisureland’, a lavish, crime-less suburb for the shrunken people. They learn that their equity will radically enlarge once they become small. Paul’s mid-life crisis and perpetual failures in life naturally pushes him towards this dreamland. The dates for downsizing are all set. It leads to the film’s most brilliant scene, the detailed process through which a person gets small: dental work undone since fillings can’t shrink which can literally make your head explode; row of people are sedated and nakedly lie on a stretcher, before being placed inside a well-lit chamber (the levers pulled and knobs turned outside the chamber could very well kindle the images of Nazi gas chamber); and finally the room full of downsized people are moved to tiny stretchers using spatulas (cinematographer Phedon Papamichael has done a magnificent job in this scene). Just when Paul thinks his blissful life chapter is about to begin, he learns that Audrey has had a change of heart.

The ‘Leisureland’ might be miniature in size, but it’s pretty much a mirror image of larger flawed society (a literal microcosm), with the same bureaucratic apathy, inequity, inequality, immigration problems and so on. In countries that are less democratic, the downsizing method is used upon the impoverished, dissidents, activists, etc. Paul Safranek hears this appalling news from his new huge mansion. However, a year later we see him working in a corporate cubicle and living in a teeny-tiny condo (the divorce probably has pushed him into this lucrative financial position). Paul is once again leading a drab, boring life. From then on, the narrative tries to make grand statements on poverty, exploited workers, compassion, cults, inevitable destruction of human race, without ever sharply focusing on the themes. What’s more worse is the dry characterization of Paul. Unlike Alexander Payne’s consistently thorough look at the existential malaise of middle-aged or old American Midwestern men (in Election, Sideways, About Schmidt, The Descendants, and Nebraska), Downsizing’s Paul simply comes off as a punchline, and that too a very tedious one. He is so noncommittal and impassive to make any considerable impact in the proceedings.

Payne and Taylor’s highly ambitious ideas not only fail to take root, they totally fumble with the task of creating an interesting point of view. Christoph Waltz’s amoral yet charming black marketeer Dusan looks like a vibrant character, but eventually gets lost in the convoluted story structure. Hong Chau’s self-determined Vietnamese refugee Ngoc Lan Tran (who was shrunk against her will for protesting against the government) could have been the much-needed relief from Paul’s passive nature, but her character too verges on caricature and almost reduced to a dramatic device. Hong does provide a very committed performance, but somehow the latent romance between Tran and Paul isn’t built up with earnestness. In films like Nebraska and About Schmidt, Mr. Payne took story-lines rife with sentimentality and conceit to turn it into deep, unflinching examinations of human condition. But Downsizing’s later portions are plagued with cheap sentimental turns and dramatically slack ideas. And despite the vast thematic constructs, Payne’s ultimate message is pretty simple (being compassionate to the less fortunate is pivotal than our preoccupations about survival of human race or obsession over utopian society; and Payne usually don’t give messages, but simply raises ponderous question) so as to not warrant these rough narrative twists.

By the time, the narrative moves to ‘shrinking procedure’ scene, Downsizing comes closer to John Frankenheimer’s under-appreciated masterpiece Seconds (1966). That film tackled the dark ironies of human condition alongside the era's highly politicized notions through the well-defined subjective angle of a existentially scarred middle-aged banker. Payne and Taylor’s script, however, moves between individualistic and broader perspective, utterly failing to balance between the two. Downsizing (135 minutes) is definitely a disappointing movie from one of the great contemporary American film-maker; partly because the audacious story elements never coalesce to form a powerful sci-fi satire. It’s a lesson on how good intentions and challenging concepts could be easily marred by weak execution. 

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Downsizing (2017) -- IMDb 

The Party and the Guests [1966] – A Highly Relevant Parable about Bland Conformity

Jan Nemec is one of the influential film-makers of the outstanding Czechoslovak New Wave movement. He graduated from the famous Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU) and made the excellent short film ‘A Loaf of Bread’ (1960). The themes and formal language of the short were expanded in his brilliant debut feature Diamonds of the Night (1964), a tale of two young men fleeing from Nazi death-camp. Around the same time, Milos Forman, Jiri Menzel, Vera Chytilova and many others made formally radical films on the themes of political and social repressions. Although these Czech film-makers’ stylistic spectrum differed, their ideological parameters more or less remained the same. The extraordinary film movement was immediately suppressed following the Soviet invasion to crackdown reformist movements in Prague (the brief period of political liberalization in 1968 was known as ‘Prague Spring’). Nemec released his follow-up feature The Party and the Guests (‘O slavnosti a hostech’) in 1966, which the authorities banned immediately. It was again released in 1968 during the Prague Spring, but soon was 'banned forever’.

Jan Nemec creative flurry bestowed another gem of a film titled ‘Martyrs of Love’ and a documentary short, 'Oratorio for Prague' (Nemec captured on film the Soviet’s invasion in August 1968). Nemec always faced troubles with Czech authorities and the Soviet invasion almost brought his career to an end (he was in only in his early thirties). Soon, he moved to Paris, and other European countries, and eventually to US. But he found it hard to work in these film industries and mostly did TV movies, documentaries. He also worked as professional wedding videographer. Nemec returned to Czechoslovakia, but the years of marginalization didn’t allow his profound artistry to attain a foothold in the film industry. Nemec died on March 18, 2016 in Prague. Nemec’s three distinct, absurdist movies (all the three runs for little more than an hour), however, represents themes and issues that’s riddled with universality. The Party and the Guests – Nemec’s most political film – still remains as a testament to his great artistry.

Jan Nemec’s films are known for formal experimentation, unorthodox characterizations, and theatrical staging with surrealistic touches. He neither had desire for social realism nor conventional narrative approach. In the absurdist drama ‘The Party and the Guests’, there are no central characters. Movie historian Peter Hames mentions that parallels have been drawn between Nemec’s film and Luis Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel (although Hames states Nemec didn’t see Bunuel’s film or even Renoir’s Rules of the Game). The script for Party and the Guests with its overt allegorical representations was written by Nemec and Ester Krumbachova, a costume designer as well as a script writer, whom Nemec married. The film is set in beautiful Czech countryside, where a group of seven bourgeois city-people are enjoying their picnic. They have just had their feast and talks about things that are inscrutable. The group’s (3 couples and one man) interactions are shown through mid-shots of cross-cut faces. Despite the vast countryside, this approach creates a sense of claustrophobia.

The interaction almost comes to an end with the distinguished group observing the parade of boisterous wedding-party marchers on the top of the hill. The women quickly wash themselves and they all make their way over the hill. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a group of serious-faced guys (all of them stare at the camera) led by an eccentric young guy Rudolf block the path of bourgeois people. Rudolf’s arrival escalates the ‘party’ as he holds the ‘guests’ inside a circle-like mark on the ground. Surrounded by tough-looking men, Rudolf grills them with vague questions and deters them from leaving the circular ‘mark’ (two stones are kept to represent a ‘door’ for this interrogation room). One of the guests named Karel disdains the charade and walks off, who is harassed by Rudolf and his thugs. The chaos comes to an end, when the party’s host arrives, a benevolent man dressed in a white-suit. It is revealed that bourgeois couples are guests of this gentleman’s birthday party and Rudolf is the man’s adopted son. The situation is smoothed out and apologies are exchanged and accepted. The banquet takes place in a beautiful lakeside setting. But the party host’s delight doesn’t last long as he is announced that one of the guests (one of the picnickers) has run away (clearly annoyed by the absurdity). The ‘benevolent’ host wonders why this guest would refuse this ‘happiness’.

Obvious parallels could be drawn between host’s decision to track down missing guest and the picnic-goers, embroiled in passivity, with the totalitarian regime where dissension is frowned upon and where general public live under the pretense of ‘happiness’. But the non-specific situation, riddled with healthy dose of Kafkaesque abstract elements, doesn’t restrict Nemec’s parable within a rigid political framework (of the Czech communist regime). The actions, reactions, and passivity of the ‘guests’ could be transferred to different social or political context, without diminishing its relevance. Nemec and Ester’s characters face the dangers of becoming types than representation of real people. But the writers’ suggestion of the underlying basic human behavior makes it realistic. The film is a treatise on how irrational human nature can be sometimes; on how selfishness and the desire to be part of a ‘group’ can influence our behavior. It’s also a smart examination of how the ‘gentlemen hosts’ (all around the world) always demands full conformity (and rattled by little opposition).

Rudolf and the white-suited ‘host’ are the two different, but equally morbid personas of constricted political or social structure. By the time Rudolf’s antics reaches a peak, the host intervenes, and we breathe sigh of relief as if he is the savior. However, we soon learn how the host’s authoritarianism is equally unpleasant as Rudolf’s. The ‘tough-guys’ and ‘benevolent superior’ eventually join together to hunt down the single, non-conforming force (other succumbed to authority have the banquet to enjoy). The passive people (or guests) allow the existence of this ‘system’ which eventually turns them into victims (even they are afraid to cross a simple line marked on the ground). After the film’s release and ban, director Nemec clarified that his ‘depiction of authoritarianism could be applied anywhere’. With the final shot, where dogs’ barking escalates (as the end-credits roll up), we can reflect on how this timeless, absurd scenario could be applied anywhere around the world (in both ends of ideological spectrum); in any situations where non-conformist behavior is seen as a foolish thing.

One of the interesting aspects of The Party and the Guests is the confusing dialogues. The random bit of conversations never makes sense and rarely clarifies the character’s predicament. The interactions are designed to confirm the absurdity of the situation. Like most of the movies of Czech New Wave, Nemec denies conventional characterization where viewers identify with the characters. The only character whom we could consider as some sort of ‘hero’ – the non-conforming guest – doesn’t talk much and never explains about his decision to run away (even he runs away off-the-screen). These forms of dialogues and characterizations resonant very well with the distinct visual style, which has many strange montage shots of faces. All these aspects work in tandem to create a unique, unsettling atmosphere that doesn’t belong to a specific time.

The Party and the Guests (68 minutes) is a playful allegory on how people find it easy to enclose themselves within a rigid system of thought. It’s also an astute interrogation of the different masks worn by totalitarian regimes. 

The Party and the Guests (1966) -- IMDb

A Report on the Party and Guests -- Criterion Collection