MENZEL IS UPBEAT ABOUT CZECH FILMS

No sooner had director Jiri Menzel’s poignant tragicomedy “Closely Watched Trains” won the best foreign film Oscar in 1968 than the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia sounded the death knell of the flowering Czech New Wave.

Between 1969 and 1974 Menzel was not able to direct any films at all, but since then he has gradually resurrected his career, culminating with “My Sweet Little Village,” currently at the Beverly Center Cineplex and the Westside Pavilion and Czechoslovakia’s official entry in the Oscars.

“It was a temptation,” Menzel admitted when asked if he had ever considered leaving Czechoslovakia, as did his countryman Milos Forman. “But I felt I’d be more useful there. Anyway, California has enough directors!”

Menzel was sitting in his Beverly Hills hotel suite, speaking occasionally in English but relying on Czech-born writer Erna Segal to translate for him. Although he remarked how different he felt from the man he was on his first visit to Hollywood 19 years ago--”I was so young,” he said ruefully--he is in some ways the same. He already had that survivor’s wit so characteristic of Eastern Europeans, but now it has deepened.

At 48, he still looks trim, with only some graying at the temples and some crinkling around the eyes to mark the passage of time. He is in far better spirits now than he was 10 years ago when he served on the jury of what proved to be the last Teheran Film Festival. He’s still single, saying mischievously, “I prefer clever girls, and the smart ones will never marry me.”

There’s no question he and other members of the Czech New Wave have had a hard time, but Menzel understandably does not want to dwell on this. In response to praise for “My Sweet Little Village,” he said, “I think we can make even more interesting films in the future. I hope so.” (Ironically, the two long-running hit films in Czechoslovakia are “My Sweet Little Village” and Forman’s “Amadeus,” both of which opened last summer.)

Considering that Czech film makers today do not have the freedom of expression, especially in regard to political issues, they had in the early ‘60s, it’s remarkable that “My Sweet Little Village” is as candid as it is.

Although “Closely Watched Trains,” which centered on a naive young train dispatcher’s sexual initiation, was set in World War II, it had much clearly implied criticism of contemporary Czechoslovakia. A much sunnier picture, “My Sweet Little Village” celebrates small-town life and its resistance against a Prague bureaucrat taking over a cottage that’s been the lifelong home of a sweet retarded village youth. With a wry smile, Menzel reveals that the film grew out of an idea he came up with while hastily avoiding a bureaucratic snafu; he knocked it out to pad one of his scripts that fell three pages short of the length at which it had been officially budgeted.

(Two of his films, the 1978 “Those Wonderful Men With Cranks,” a comedy about silent movie-making, and the 1980 “Short Cut,” a period romantic comedy set in a brewery, were seen at festivals, but Menzel realizes they were too bland to attract American distributors.)

In discussing his working with “My Sweet Little Village’s” writer Zdenek Sverak, Menzel revealed that he had in fact initially wanted a downbeat ending. “Zdenek said that this would be very sad. He argued that people had a hard enough time living, and that at least let them experience some joy when they went to the movies. He said, ‘Let’s show that sometimes things can work out for the best.’ I decided he was right. It was a small compromise for me to make. Zdenek is such a good writer. He likes people. He sees their faults--and likes them in spite of them. In a way, that’s daring. This sense of community, that is what makes the film appealing. There’s probably no more real sense of community in most Czechoslovakian towns than there is here, but I now want to do films not about reality but about how life could be. Czechoslovakia has never been completely free, so you have to be subtle, you have to express ideas with humor.”

“My Sweet Little Village” has such warmth that its large cast surely must have been enjoying itself during filming. “Oh yes, fun is the prerequisite, even at a certain loss of quality,” said Menzel with a smile. “I’m not interested in yelling at people, and I always am interested in creating a good atmosphere. A good atmosphere will find its way onto the screen. A reporter who visited our set said that it was more like being at a scout camp than being with a film company. I can choose my own collaborators and that way avoid the nasty types.”

One thing that Menzel and other Czech film makers can’t avoid, however, are ever-tightening budgets; according to him, the automatic guarantee that a Czech film-maker has of a release has resulted in a a number of mediocre films “that nobody wants to see,” which in turn means there’s less money for production to be allotted by the state-run film industry.

Menzel, who has just finished directing three different plays in three different cities--Zurich, Berlin and Prague--within five months, returned to his first love, the theater, as an actor during the years when he was not allowed to direct films. Whenever possible, he resumes his role as a high-living bachelor in “Bedtime Story,” a 1951 Sean O’Casey slapstick comedy that has been running in Prague since 1975. “I’m prouder of that performance,” said Menzel, “than anything else I’ve ever done.”