On 26 August 1965, a new Czechoslovak feature film entitled The Loves of a Single Swimmer, by the then thirty-three-year-old director Miloš Forman (1932-2018), screenwriters Jaroslav Papoušek (1929-1996), Miloš Forman and Ivan Passer (1933-2020), and cinematographer Miroslav Ondříček (1934-2015), premiered at the Venice International Film Festival. Forman's third feature film is a bitter comedy with a banal plot, which was thrown into the director's path by a chance encounter with a young textile worker from the North Bohemian town of Varnsdorf.
"I wasn't married for the second time at the time and I was often wandering aimlessly and without a destination from friend to friend, from pub to pub. One day, it was already after midnight, I was driving my car home to Všehrdova Street and suddenly I saw a girl with a suitcase walking across the bridge. I stopped and offered to help the girl, while I learned that she had come to see a boy she had befriended a few days earlier in Varnsdorf. However, as she found out, the address he gave her was a fake. From her I also learned about the situation in Varnsdorf, which then appeared in the film. Large textile factories, an area depopulated after the Germans moved out, far more girls than boys." The story of the Varnsdorf worker was supplemented by another source of inspiration - the life story of the main actress Hana Brejchová. Instead of the predominantly German Varnsdorf before the war, Miloš Forman decided to film in another Czech industrial town.
" At that time, we were passionate about playing billiards. The communists considered billiards a bourgeois pastime, and therefore there were very few good tables to be had. But there was one at the castle in Dobris, so we went there to write the script. We called the film The Loves of a Mermaid. We filmed it in Zruč nad Sázavou, where there were shoe factories with a majority of female employees, and so the lack of males was as pressing a problem there as it was in Varnsdorf. The story was clear to all the locals and they happened to have a decent pool table, " recalled director and co-writer Forman.
The iconic work of the Czechoslovak New Wave of the 1960s caught the attention of the Venice Film Festival jury, which awarded the work the Golden Lion in the Best Film category. While the festival jury was captivated by Forman's bitter comedy with its easy-to-believe depiction of human everyday life, Italian and foreign critics were rather puzzled and accused the film of having too banal a subject. Nevertheless, the film was one of five non-English-language films nominated for an Academy Award in 1967. In Czechoslovakia, Forman's film did not have an easy time with either the approvers or the critics. The chief dramaturg of Barrandov Film Studios reportedly let it be known that it was the most boring script he had read in years, naive and untrue. The project was eventually pushed through by Jiří Šebor and Vladimír Bor, the heads of the creative group at Barrandov Film Studios. The argument for the production of the project was, among other things, the fact that the film had only a minimal budget. However, Forman's work was also criticised by a section of the public, who threatened the director with anonymous letters and death threats (allegedly even death) because of intimate scenes. Perhaps because of them, men's expeditions began to arrive at the filming location, which only irritated the already concerned management of the local Sázavan factory, which had a decidedly different idea of a film about working youth and their life outside of work at a boarding school.
"In our film, the kindly factory director feels sorry for all those lonely girls, " recalled Miloš Forman. "So he arranges with the soldiers to send a military crew to his town. The women in the town are all rife for the big day, but the military train dumps a squad of scruffy balding and buxom reservists in town. At the opening dance that is thrown to welcome the troops, the blonde heroine of the film is picked up by a young pianist. He's no playboy, but he's from Prague and gives the blonde his address. A few weeks later, the girl actually visits him, but only her parents are home. The blonde doesn't know anyone in town, so the parents take pity and let her sleep on the couch in the kitchen where their son sleeps. He ends up in his parents' bed that night. They can barely fit. The father wants to sleep, the son would prefer to be kicked out so he can go lie on his couch in the kitchen with the girl, but the whole thing is orchestrated by the mother, who would not tolerate any such nastiness at home. At the end of the film, the disappointed blonde returns to her boarding school in Zruč and makes up stories about her loving fiancé from Prague, the kind that make all the girls in the room fall asleep."
Despite initial obstacles, Forman's film eventually found its way to home audiences. The film premiered on November 12, 1965. Over two million people saw the film in Czechoslovak cinemas. "The Love of a Mermaid" was screened throughout Czechoslovakia and won me the Klement Gottwald State Prize. The award of this first workers' president and renowned drunkard was rather embarrassing for me, but it had one advantage. The ribbon came with a thick envelope containing 20,000 CZK (800 Euro), which was almost a year's income at the time, and this sweetened the merciless ridicule with which Ivan [Passer, MJ note] honoured all the winners of this prize."
The stay in Zruč nad Sázavou and in the scenery of the post-Bat'ov enterprise Sázavan and its social background was literally formative for director Forman: " I remember those few months in Zruč nad Sázavou as some of my happiest days on film. We had all the time we needed. We played billiards. We rolled around laughing when Pucholt raved with his parents on their narrow double bed." Above all, however, Forman engaged several zruč non-actors in the film, among whom he discovered what are probably the most famous non-actors in Czechoslovak cinema. To blend in with people who are simply playing themselves requires actors of a really high calibre, and that's what Vladimír Menšík was." And also Josef Šebánek (1915-1977) as the father and Josef Kolb (1901-1982) in the autobiographical role of the production master Pokorný. The pair of Šebánek and Kolb became literally inseparable for the next few years, as the actors appeared together in Forman's next feature film Hoří, má panenko (1967), as well as in Nejkrásnější věk ( 1968) and Hogo fogo Homolka ( 1970). Other skilled non-actors also appeared in Forman's Love, however, whether we are thinking of Jana Nováková as the friend of the title character, Andula, who returned to film once more in the fantasy thriller The End of August at the Ozon Hotel ( 1966, directed by Jan Schmidt), or Antonín Blažejovský as Tondy, who also appeared in front of the camera in Forman's Hoří, má panenko ( 1967).
In Forman's Love, it was not only non-actors from among the inhabitants of Zruč who acted, but also the scenery of the local industrial exteriors and interiors: the Zruč nad Sázavou railway station became the backdrop for the scene of the girls from the factory waiting for the arrival of the train with the soldiers, the actual arrival of the reservists, and the soldiers' march towards the factory grounds. The area in front of the factory was used to film scenes of the employees going home after their work shift, Tonda's waiting on his motorcycle for his ex-girlfriend Andula, and a mutual conversation about the ring Tonda gave his former love. Tonda's unwelcome visit to Andula in the girls' dormitory and the preceding conversation through the window with Andula's friends took place in front of the hostel at 593 Postal Street today. Finally, the dancing entertainment and love scenes between Andula and her new love, the dancing pianist Milda, were performed in the hall and dormitory of the Bata Social House at today's Square of Peace, No. 549. Today these places are fixed points on the map of Czechoslovak film history and historiography.
