Best movie of this year hands down!

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

I'll tell you why so serious

Great Film overall

CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS is a comedy drama, in which, the paradox of a point is included in the title. This is a reference to a shy youth, social and political turmoil, while arrogant trains of life passing by. The film is based on a 1965 novel by Bohumil Hrabal.The young Miloš Hrma, who speaks with misplaced pride of his family of misfits and malingerers, is engaged as a newly trained station guard in a small railway station during the Second World War and the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. The stationmaster is passionate breeder of pigeons and rabbits. The train dispatcher Hubička is preoccupied with women. Miloš holds an as-yet platonic love for the pretty, young conductor, but he is still a virgin. The Nazi-minded Zednicek periodically visits a train station. However, it seems that his propaganda has no effect on the station staff. Problems arise when Máša wants sex with Miloš...It is a coming-of-age story about a nervous young man who is going through a kind of "sexual crisis" to a desperate knowledge. Mr. Menzel has showed a birth of a heroic act from an indifferent social environment and internal youthful anxiety. This is a charming and witty deflection from false problems.The atmosphere is very good, while the characterization is excellent. Some scenes are imaginative to tragicomic proportions. I would not characterize this film as a kind of ideological criticism. This is only a preview of a touching reality.Václav Neckář as Miloš Hrma is a funny and tragic hero who constantly volunteers in a suicide mission. Josef Somr as train dispatcher Hubička is enough perverse, aware and sympathetic to one member of the resistance. Jitka Bendová as conductor Máša is girl who is full of understanding. Jitka Zelenohorská as telegraphist Zdenička has realized that the stamps can be very creative. Vladimír Valenta as stationmaster has understood that nothing can be black and white. Libuše Havelková as stationmaster wife is a clever woman. Naďa Urbánková as Viktoria Freie is a kind of salvation, which, unfortunately, take a young life.

This film of the Czechoslovak New Wave has a gentle sense of the absurd, as if young Milos was still stuck in his childhood and unable to reconcile with what was looming to be a second world war. These events of course always spurned a sort of accelerated growing up because there was battles to be fought and every able young man was necessary to the war effort. So what we see is Milos trying again and again to lose his virginity and fix his premature ejaculation because only then would he become a man - not the awkward, gangly teenager that bumbles around the place and takes after his lazy father. In a amusing twist, his despondent suicide attempt because of his masculine shortcomings is actually interpreted as an attempt to get out of the war effort. Elsewhere we see a lot of bad advice that sticks to Milos with an anxious, unshakeable presence. His mother wishes him luck as he takes over the mantle as a station guard and encourages him to work hard so that he might also be able to retire early and relax on the pension like his father. Both Hubicka and the doctor push him into losing his virginity with an older, experienced woman so that he might finally be a man, which leads to a series of comedic conversations where Milos asks nearly everyone in sight, including his colleague's sisters and wives. "Think of football", he is advised, so that he might not ejaculate early. What this really does is make it even more important in Milos' mind. The war is coming. The trains must be blown up. He hastily agrees to anything that might prove his worth. What Menzel has done here is fully embrace the comic nature of chasing and sexual advances, even in wartime. Soldiers are briefly frozen as girls wave at them from the other side of the tracks. The stationmaster fidgets and bellows to calls of dinner like child unable to stop playing with a new toy. In the most absurdly whimsical sequence of them all, Hubicka slowly makes his way up a young girl's skirt, but he is not applying kisses, but station stamps on her skin. Even the most intimate of sexual activity is quietly being sanctioned and recorded bureaucratically. Later, in the farcical 'trial' of this event, Menzel continually cross-cuts away to suggest the roar of the train is soon to arrive. Milos, in his new-found, supercharged confidence (and therefore recklessness) becomes the standout Czechoslovakian figure, breaking free of the oppressive communist regime and representing a movement that would no longer be satisfied with watching trains patiently - for the Fuhrer or any other target.

This movie is all about sex. It has trains going in and out of tunnels. It has images of inflation and deflation. It has the preoccupation with getting laid. Oh, there is something about a war, but in the little train station, every once in a while someone pulls a lever, signals the train, and then goes back to his or her boring lives (made not-so-boring) by one encounter after another. Everyone winks and looks the other way. As a matter of fact, even thought the young man gets a really prestigious job, he doubts his own manhood because he can't perform one time and actually tries suicide. This is such an over-the-top movie and so unlike anything I've ever seen, I became fascinated with this. The images of the little station and the culture that revolves around it, the cinematography is outstanding. I especially enjoyed the office Casenova who remained unflappable in every circumstances, even when he is accused of misuse of government property for using official stamps as he spanks the young woman he works with. It's a great moment of humor. See this movie. You won't forget it.

The "Closely Watched Trains" are those that are carrying supplies to the German army in and through occupied Czechoslovakia during World War II. That is why they are closely watched--so that they run on time. But they are also closely watched by the people of Czechoslovakia, especially dispatcher Hubicka (Josef Somr) and his trainee Milos Hrma (Vaclav Neckar) for another reason, which will become apparent as the movie ends.Not that Milos and Hubicka are especially diligent workers. On the contrary. What Hubicka is especially adept at is seduction of females while Milos is distracted by his worries about becoming a man. He has what must be seen as a problem demanding comic relief (if you will). He has trouble pleasing his girl friend because of premature ejaculation. He is so consumed by this embarrassing failure that he seeks quietus in the warm bath of a bordello. Meanwhile Hubicka is able to please the pretty young telegraphist Virginia Svata (Jitka Zelenohorska) by playing a kind of strip poker with her and rubber stamping her pretty legs and butt much to her delight and to the consternation of her mother when she finds out. The German Councilor Zednicek (Vlastimil Brodsky) who tolerates no hanky-panky when it comes to keeping the trains moving conducts an investigation and comes to the conclusion that Hubicka is guilty of misuse and abuse of the great German language because he stamped German words onto Virginia's body! This is the tone of the film, wryly ironic, irreverent and mildly comedic, employing in a sense a kind of off-center "theater of the absurd" treatment. Director Jiri Menzel, who appears briefly in the film as Dr. Brabec who diagnoses Milos's "affliction," spun this off from a novel by Bohumil Hrabal, but it could easily have come from a novel by Jaroslav Hasek, who wrote the celebrated Czech classic, "The Good Soldier Svejk," so alike in treatment and tone are they, and so very characteristic of the Czech national mind-set vis-a-vis all the horrors of the European wars. Menzel concentrates on the petty affairs of day-to-day peasant life, sex, the raising of pigeons and geese, the boredom of bureaucratic jobs as he works toward the culminating scene in which the heroics seem almost light-hearted and to come about more from happenstance than from careful planning.Some of the scenes in the movie are absolutely unique in the world of cinema and suggest a kind of cinematic genius. The creepy goose-stuffing (for foie gras pate) scene in which Milos seeks help with his "problem" from an older woman is riotous--or would be riotous if we were not so amazed as what she is doing while talking to him and what it LOOKS like she might be doing! The scene in which Stationmaster Lanska is torn between the prospect of seducing a voluptuous woman and the chance that he might miss supper reminded me of a little boy at play with his mother calling him home for dinner. The final scene in which it looks like Menzel may have employed a wind machine is just so perfectly presented, combining as it does the stark realism of the war and a delicious (but soon to be mixed) personal triumph of the resistance.This is one of the classic films of all time. But prepare to put aside ordinary viewing habits and to concentrate with an alert mind. The subtleties of Menzel's little masterpiece will be obscured by inattention, preconceptions and faulty expectations. (Or at least that is what they'll tell you at film school.) See this Oscar winner (Best Foreign Film, 1967) for Jiri Menzel who survived oppression and censorship by the Soviets and is still making movies.(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)