My Sweet Little Village (1985)
The movie's main storyline follows the life of Otík, a young man, in a tight-knit village community. The sweet-tempered Otík works as an assistant truck driver with Mr. Pávek, his older colleague and practical-minded neighbor. Pávek's family takes care of Otík, whose parents are dead. However, the two coworkers become at odds over Otík's inability to perform even the simplest tasks. Pávek demands that Otík be transferred to assist another driver, who happens to be a choleric and suspicious man named Turek (Turk in Czech). Rather than work with Turek, Otík decides to accept an offer of employment in Prague, but finds he does not fit in to the city life. After discovering that the transfer of Otík to Prague was a trick by a crooked politician to get a deal on Otík's large inherited house, Pávek agrees to give Otík a second chance and retrieves him from the city to resume their work together.
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Reviews
Brilliant and touching
The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.
If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.
It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.
The doctor keeps crashing his car, the lorry driver is fed up with his simpleton mate and plots to move him to Prague, the girls no longer wear bras and there's flirting, drunkenness, infidelity, and even the odd punch-up. There are hints of darker bureaucratic inadequacies (this film was made in the final years of the Communist regime), but director Jiří Menzel's loving observations of Czech village life are wryly humorous, and this is principally a gentle and affectionate paean in which nothing much happens except the ebb and flow of village life the eternal nature of which is hinted at by the circular ending. A subtle joy from start to finish. Czech DVD has moderately reliable English subtitles.
My sweet little village is just that. A story about the people who live and die in a small village outside of Prague. In more ways than one, this is a story about living in a country where the form of government is communism. By the end of the movie, communism fails to effect the outcome of many of the lives in the village. Although this is a comedy at times, the movie falls into many dramatic pits where you wonder what is going to happen next. The brotherhood between many characters shows the village as more of a family than just a small town of people. There is more than jut one story in this movie. The main story is the village, but the plot is about the handful of lives that inhabit the village and how they effect one another. A pure delight.