GRADE: 10
An apprentice train dispatcher at a village station seeks his first sexual encounter and becomes despondent when he is unable to perform.
Original Title: Ostre sledované vlaky
Director: Jirí Menzel
Country: Czechoslovakia
THOUGHTS:
A marvelously quirky and deeply human mix of comedy, romance, and war-time drama. There’s something so beautiful and tender about the young train dispatcher’s coming-of-age issues that consume, while the larger world around him is enmeshed in a fight for the future of Europe. It’s hard to explain how a film in which the main character—an innocent if ever there was one—can both attempt suicide and later die rather abruptly can be so utterly charming, amusing, and full of hope. But Closely Watched Trains is that film.
It also contains one of the oddest, but most erotically charged scenes I’ve ever seen, in which a young woman receives immense pleasure from having her hindside rubber stamped!