TEACHING WAR

“At 6 p.m. after the war in By the Chalice!” If the words Czech and army conjure up first and foremost images of the boozed-up, innocent sabotage of the good soldier Švejk, Adéla Komrzý’s film may cure you of those associations. For the Czechs seem to long for it somehow, war. At least that’s the impression one could get when children start to pine for World War Three just because the papers wrote about it, and men are stuck back in “the good old days” when everyone had to go to the army for two years. Taking on various perspectives, the film treats the re-armament of the small nation that sees itself as a plaything of the great powers and now seeks to gain the presumable ability to defend itself militarily. While the country’s cultural history has elevated such subversive characters as the good soldier Švejk, the greatest (and fictional) Czech Jára Cimrman and Miloš Hrma, who spoke proudly of the family tradition of faking in Closely Watched Trains, to the position of national heroes, the individuals depicted in TEACHING WAR are focussed both in their school and leisure time on “protecting” themselves against invisible (though very menacingly imagined) enemies. With great rigor and tenacity and skilful use of archive materials, the young director delivers a complex portrait of a soldierly mind-set capable of seeping into any institution. What may appear to some as a journey back to a bygone era is for others salvation itself, even when a last bit of doubt remains.