It's not all that often that I for one come across a movie totally unknown to me and written, directed and performed by people who are just names albeit names worthy of respect in their own country. Ucho is one of those films from a country we used to call Czechoslovakia -Billy Wilder had a lot of fun with the name, recommending spelling it backwards as a cure for insomnia in his script for Bluebeard's Eighth Wife - which then became the Czech Republic and has now fragmented into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. What few films I've seen from there - with the possible exception of 'Daisies' - I've enjoyed though it is a woefully small total, The Fireman's Ball, Closely Observed Trains, Kolya, Divided We Fall, which are now supplemented by Ucho. Watching it I was reminded in turn of L'Aveu and The Trial given that it contains elements of both. It's also something of a Long Night's Journey Into Day chronicling as it does the time that elapses between a government Minister arriving home late from a party to slowly realise that in the absence of himself and his wife their house has been bugged by his own Party, and the next morning when his fears prove theoretically groundless as he learns he is to replace a Minister who has been deposed. Although on paper this makes for a sigh of relief in reality it just means he will have an even higher profile and be that much bigger a target for Party hit men. Shot in black and white the film mirrors a society that for us in the West is virtually impossible to imagine but even then the tension is liberally laced with humour. A fine film in a fine tradition.
Review of The Ear
