History’s weird ghosts, echoes

“I don’t care if people are Democrats or Republicans, communists or anti-communists,” says director Milos Forman. “I divide people between those I am afraid of and those I am not. Once you have lived under the Nazis and the Communists, you learn these kinds of things.”

The official portraitist of “Amadeus” and “The People vs. Larry Flynt” will return to theaters Friday with “Goya’s Ghosts,” a costume drama and controlled historical epic that marks his first film since the Andy Kaufman biopic “Man on the Moon” in 1999. Yet rather than a meta-portrait of the great court painter of Spanish royalty Francisco Goya, “Goya’s Ghosts” chronicles the long tail of the Spanish Inquisition, the “liberation” of Spain at the hands of Napoleon and the subsequent expulsion of the imported French Revolution by a guerrilla uprising, in conjunction with the British Duke of Wellington and the Catholic clergy.

The story is told through the eyes of the premier artist of the era, or what art critic Robert Hughes, in his definitive biography “Goya,” called “the first modern visual reporter on warfare.” And as structured by screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, who collaborated with Luis Bunuel, Louis Malle and Volker Schlondorff, among others, these rather dry historical events create a startling allegory for modern geopolitical adventurism -- a subject the 75-year-old director has had much time to reflect on as of late.

Forman is recovering at his farm in Connecticut from a cracked vertebra incurred in his native Czech Republic, where he recently returned to stage his first opera, “A Walk Worthwhile,” at the National Theater, a version of which he directed for Czech television in 1966, two years before the “Prague Spring” revolution and subsequent Soviet crackdown made his position there untenable. (As to his injury, Forman advises, “Don’t go to the minibar in the night without turning the lights on.”)

‘Put to the question’

AS “Goya’s Ghosts” opens, clerics can be seen furtively studying Goya’s “Disasters of War” series of surreptitious etchings, published only after the artist’s death, and volubly lamenting, “This is how the world sees us.” Inquisitor Javier Bardem rejects Voltaire, and with him all of Enlightenment thought, as “the dark prince of the darkest principles” and labels talk of “atoms” and modern science diabolical. Natalie Portman’s character is “put to the question,” the church’s palliative euphemism for interrogation and torture, and imprisoned for 15 years because of a gross misunderstanding. And the proto-American Randy Quaid, as Spain’s King Carlos IV, takes to hunting vultures (which are drawn to him by the carcass of a dead sheep, no less). It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to find Abu Ghraib, global warming, the detaining of terror suspects at Guantanamo and elsewhere, in not too veiled subtext.

And yet for all the film’s modern parallels, its director seems like he wishes such pointed analogies would just go away.

“I am myself confused to talk about these things,” says Forman. “I feel like I have to apologize now for making this movie, to explain to everybody that the final screenplay for this film was finished months before the Iraq war. I didn’t put these parallels into place myself. History put these parallels into the story.”

Forman has come by such political reticence the hard way. Born in 1932 in Prague, he was 7 when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia at the onset of WWII. Both his parents died in Auschwitz: His father was a Jewish army reservist from WWI and university teacher accused of disseminating forbidden literature to his students. His Protestant mother’s only apparent crime was shopping at a local grocery where the Germans discovered anti-Nazi propaganda. According to Forman, based on his search of postwar records, although his mother was acquitted at trial, her case file was stamped “Return Undesirable,” and she disappeared into the camps.

In 1948, Czechoslovakia formally fell under the control of the Soviet Union, and for the next two decades Forman quietly negotiated the gradually loosening rules of official conduct. In the mid-’60s, he directed a series of gentle satires of bureaucratic inefficiency and the changing times that became international hits, particularly “Black Peter,” “The Loves of a Blonde” and “The Firemen’s Ball.” Of his most famous film, which won best picture and best director Oscars, Forman says, “ ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ is a Czech movie. It was not a fiction for me; I lived that. For me, the Communist Party was Nurse Ratched.”

When the Soviet tanks rolled into the nation’s capital in 1968 to suppress a dissident uprising, Forman and fellow Czech filmmakers Pavel Juracek, Jan Nemec and others were in Paris, where, like Trotsky in Brooklyn, they completely missed the (counter-) revolution their work had long anticipated. While Forman’s wife and twin sons returned home, he and filmmaker Ivan Passer set sail for America, where Forman eventually became a nationalized citizen. (His twin sons, Matej and Petr, now 42, are actors in the Czech Republic, as is his ex-wife, Vera Kresadlova. The couple were finally divorced in 1999 when Forman remarried for a third time and again fathered twins.)

“This is one of the greatest ironies that I lived through,” Forman recalls. “I am in France, there with my friends and colleagues, and we admire each other enormously: Francois Truffaut, Claude Berri, Louis Malle, [Claude] Chabrol, [Jean-Luc] Godard -- the French Nouvelle Vague. And while these friends of ours were trying to put a red flag on a boat, we were trying desperately to tear it down. It was total absurdity, and we all did it in the name of freedom.”

A lengthy gestation

FORMAN says the idea for exploring the life of Goya on film crystallized for him in 1984, when he and producer Saul Zaentz were on a promotional tour for “Amadeus” and found themselves in Madrid, across the street from the Prado.

Spain’s national museum is home to the largest collection of works by Goya as well as Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” a virtual catalogue of the varieties of medieval torture (and briefly featured in the film). It also, at that time, held Picasso’s “Guernica,” probably the premier antiwar artifact of the 20th century. (“Guernica” was relocated to the nearby Queen Sofia Museum in 1992.)

“It seems impossible that the painter who paints these gorgeous, brilliant, official portraits of royals and dukes and nobility can be the same painter of the black paintings on the other wall,” says Forman. “One is the peak of 18th century style, and one is the beginning of 20th century style. With ‘Disasters of War,’ Goya was probably the most courageous coward, because he didn’t do anything that would put his work in jeopardy -- it was published many years after his death.

“He painted the Spanish royal family, Napoleon’s brother [King] Joseph, the Inquisitors; Goya painted anybody. We know nothing from him about his political ideas. And I admire his attitude that he just didn’t want to get involved in politics -- he wanted to be on good terms with everybody. If he had stood up against the Inquisition, we wouldn’t have his paintings. They would have been destroyed.”

Forman’s latest work notwithstanding, the director seems to have adopted this political circumspection as a guiding mantra, leavening his natural impulses as a satirist and his personal connection with atrocity by adopting a distanced, oblique humor -- like some countrymen before him, such as Kafka. He claims to have never been affiliated with a political party or movement, even though he did let slip his support for the Vietnam War -- political anathema in the Hollywood of the late ‘70s -- at the same time he was directing the antiwar musical “Hair.”

“It was a paradox,” Forman says. “I was supporting anybody who would fight the Communists -- in Europe or in Vietnam, I didn’t care. And yet I was absolutely crazy to make this film ‘Hair,’ because it was a film about freedom.”

Which brings us in roundabout fashion back to “Goya’s Ghosts” and perhaps to a veiled self-portrait of the artist confronted with the political realities of his day. Speaking at once about the aggregation of empire in both 1807 and 2007, the 200 years between them and supporting players as mere historical details, he says:

“Napoleon went to Spain in the service of the French Revolution, to plant the seeds of democracy. And the first thing he did was clamp down on the church, confiscated their property and banished the Inquisition. He deposed royalty, because they were squeezing the population hard with taxes. Wonderful deeds, don’t you think? But he forgot one thing: Over one-fourth of the Spanish population lived on charity, which was administered by the church. Suddenly, a fourth of the population was starving, so they went into the streets and started to loot. Then the killing starts, chaos starts, and here we are. It’s the same situation. I am fascinated by American politics. When you follow American politics, you suddenly realize that anything anybody says about America is true -- the worst and the best.”

He recalls a moment in the ‘50s when the Czech Communists relaxed their ban on Western decadence to show a handful of American films that presented capitalism in a critical light -- most notably Sidney Lumet’s 1957 courtroom drama “12 Angry Men.”

“So they screened these films, and they couldn’t believe the reactions,” recalls Forman 50 years later. “We were not idealists. We didn’t think America was full of angels, that it was a paradigm. But look at the freedom they had to talk about it! They could show it to themselves and to the world that they knew about their injustices, and they were trying to warn people about them. Something was happening there. And suddenly America became the idol of freedom, a country with hope. Nowhere is paradise, but we must have hope that we can build it one day. Once you take away the hope, that’s it.”