魔鬼的契约

"It’s kind-of small town and big boredom…” is the sharp judgment "It’s kind-of small town and big boredom…” is the sharp judgment that a character in Jozef Zachar’s film, Contract With the Devil, passes on any Slovak town (including its capital city). At the point when storyline examines and explains the events that have already taken place, this comment reveals the main theme of the film, namely the forms of our boredom, the protagonists of our boredom, and what to do about our boredom. It is a theme that many viewers by the end of the 1960s appreciated as interesting, provocative, or daring. However, Zachar’s film certainly does not mark a breakthrough in filmic resolution of the theme. More than anything else, this trifle of a comedy—popular with viewers—is an interesting and emblematic battlefield of carelessly wasted opportunities. It holds viewers’ attention through a series of mere hints at insubordination to the societal constraints imposed or petrified by Communism. But the unfinished, careless filmic execution of those hints shows in high definition, so to say, the limits of many filmmakers’ thinking during the precious period of relaxed Communism in the 1960s.展开↓ 收起↑