52 Films by Women Vol 5. 12. THE GOOD SOLDIER SCHWEJK (Director: Christine Edzard)
Not many
writer-directors have their own film studio. Christine Edzard does. Since 1979,
at fluctuating intervals, she has been making her own movies – mostly features,
but also a 37-minute short, The
Nutcracker, for IMAX – in a
studio close to the River Thames, in Rotherhithe, South London, under the
banner Sands Films. Edzard was born to German and Polish parents in Paris in
1945, pursued a career in the theatre and moved from production design to screenwriting
(Tales of Beatrix Potter in 1971) to directing (Stories from a Flying Trunk). Her best-known film is a six-hour adaptation
of Little Dorrit, with a cast that included Alec Guinness,
Derek Jacobi and Roshan Seth – it was released in cinemas in two parts.
Hollywood did come calling – Sands Films provided costumes for Steven
Spielberg’s 1997 anti-slavery film, Amistad.
When you step
through the door of 82 Saint Marychurch Street, Rotherhithe, the first people
you see are Edzard, now aged 74, and a colleague. You will be offered a cup of
tea. There are leaflets on a long bench inviting you to protest to prevent military
action against Iran. Screenings in the downstairs cinema are held on a ‘pay
what you can’ basis. What you notice above all are the drawers filled with
artwork and research documents. At the end of a screening, you will be asked,
‘did you like it?’
The Good Soldier
Schwejk adapted from Jaroslav
Hašek’s
incomplete stories about the blackly comic misadventures of an unlikely
military recruit during the First World War (1914-18) is Edzard’s first film
for seventeen years. She and her production partner, Olivier Stockman, do not
intend to release it conventionally. Instead, they want to take it to theatre
spaces across the United Kingdom – and perhaps the world. It is a recording of
a theatre production, with frequent cutaways to the audience – at least one
character is located there – that frequently steps out of its own frame of
reference. One minute, Schwejk (Alfie Stewart) talks about Bohemia – what we
now call the Czech Republic. The next, he refers to Weapons of Mass Destruction
and the (alas still current) refugee crisis.
The film is made
from a pacifist, liberal standpoint with Schwejk our over-talkative guide
amongst the chaos of military preparation. Throughout, he is oblivious to the
danger in which he finds himself. He is frequently referred to as an idiot.
Perhaps nowadays we might call him autistic, given his inability to read
other’s emotions, to chatter incessantly and to display disinterested insight.
One scene illustrates
Schwejk’s ‘idiocy’. He and quartermaster Sergeant Vanek (Michael Mears) are
despatched to locate a billet for their battalion after their train has shunted
to a halt. Vanek heads left, where he is sure that there is a town. Schwejk
heads right towards a field of flowers. He too is sure that he will discover a billet.
However, his path is more inviting. We next see Vanek relating the story to two
other soldiers. Vanek indeed found a billet quickly and established sleeping
quarters for the men. Schwejk went missing for five days. He returns wearing a
Russian soldier’s overcoat, extolling its virtue. It did result in him being
mistaken for a Russian. Schwejk spends much of the film being mistaken for a
spy, a deserter or a malingerer. In fact, he is just a certified idiot, unable
to prevent the theft of his superior officer’s suitcase, which contains a
mirror taken from their lodgings. Schwejk explains that they will easily be
able to steal another one to return to their landlord. He does not think about
the time experienced by their former landlord without a mirror and the
inconvenience to other guests.
Stewart delivers his
lines in an explanatory manner, without ever suggesting emotional depth. He is
driven by logic. When Schwejk’s superior officer requires a dog for
companionship, Schwejk steals one. However, the dog belongs to a General who
takes it back. Did Schwejk know it was stolen? Yes, he was responsible. Did he
know its owner? Yes. Schwejk judged his officer’s need was greater than that of
the General. He did not think of repercussions, that the theft would reflect
badly on the officer. Schwejk has no concept that he might offend people. When
he sees a poster in which one soldier points a bayonet at the surrendering
enemy, Schwejk complains that the poster is stupid, because there is simply no
need to position a bayonet point so close to a man who is giving up. There are
rules of engagement to obey. Schwejk’s babbling suggests a criticism of the
army itself, which in turn gets him in trouble, missing a train, being
separated from his papers and being forced (at least initially) to walk to the
front.
In the film’s
opening (after the audience take their seats), Schwejk is shown on stage
suspended in the air with a cloud wrapped around his waist like a mini skirt.
He wants to begin at the end because, he argues, stories make better sense when
told backwards. He is quickly disabused of this idea by a woman who tells him
that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
was assassinated [together with his wife Sophie] in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914,
an event which precipitated the start of World War One. As Schwejk describes
what he thinks will happen next, the woman is horrified. Schwejk too is
confused. He pulls two panels across the stage to explain what happens next.
‘Austria declares war on Serbia’. ‘Germany declares war on Russia’ and so on.
Schwejk doesn’t explain the context for each action. Instead, we are invited to
consider that war only exists because vested interests prefer it that way.
Grievance is overstated.
Why have an ‘idiot’
or an autistic man at the centre of an anti-war comedy? Because he is never
complicit in the actions of the warring factions. Schwejk knows he will die. He
follows orders to the best of his interpretation. He has no ambition nor any boundaries.
In a lengthy sequence towards the end of the film, Schwejk moves between two
railway carriages, one with his fellow soldiers, the other with his superior.
‘You said I am to check on you at regular intervals,’ Schwejk explains to his
officer, oblivious to the fact that his visits are rather too regular. The
carriages are ingeniously designed on stage – Edzard knows her stuff – our view
abruptly shifting from one carriage to another. There is an officer who stands
up and eats chocolate. Schwejk and his fellow soldiers discuss goulash and
potatoes as well as the 11th battalion’s kitchen being left behind –
now they will have to share with the 12th battalion, a prospect they
do not relish. The sequence disrupts the pace of the film, but for good reason:
we don’t know it but Schwejk is heading for his death.
There is an
interesting scene in a heavenly waiting area – it isn’t purgatory because sin
isn’t discussed. Schwejk is told by a dead officer whose stars on his chest now
form a halo above his head that he must return to Earth. Earth needs ‘idiots’
to tell people that war is wrong. I understand Edzard’s intention: to show
Schwejk as the immortal messenger, forever demonstrating (through theatrical
revival) the folly of war. He is a selfless disrupter, an irritant with
information overload – he even mentions the internet. He also has no sense of
time, his time or anyone else’s.
In the front row of
the audience, there is a representative from an arms company, who states that
they do their best business in peacetime, selling to both sides. Using Hašek’s text as a starting
point, Edzard criticises our acceptance of the arms industry as a necessary
business. If she wanted to make a hard-hitting point about weapons
proliferation – and others have done this – she might have chosen a different
text. Bertolt Brecht’s Mother
Courage and her Children springs
to mind.
Edzard’s film,
especially the production design and Alfie Stewart’s unblinking central
performance, is aesthetically pleasurable. Also noteworthy is the musical
quartet – Junchi Deng on accordion, Hannah Morgan on clarinet, Brendan Musk on
trumpet and Fred Thomas on percussion – who we see from time to time performing
Mozart as arranged by Michel Sanvoisin. By the end of the film, an American (Medea
Benjamin) wearing a ‘troops home’ t-shirt jumps on stage next to Schwejk,
trying to work the audience into rejecting war. It comes across as a naïve
gesture, preaching to the converted. The way to change minds is to promise them
one thing, then give them another. In history, we may be too late to change
events. We cannot un-invent nuclear weapons. In fiction, we can engage an
audience with generic conventions that appear to offer a morally certain,
‘feelgood’ narrative, then subvert expectations. We need less didacticism and more
surrealism.
In Edzard’s film, we
get absurd humour, in which an ostrich egg is likened to a weapon of mass
destruction and a scene in which Schwejk scuppers a ciphering system by leaving
behind the second volume of a book necessary for decoding messages – the
officers are only travelling with the first volume, completely useless.
Sometimes the point of the satire is lost. The joke is that the ciphering
system is too complicated to be effective. Then it is described as derivative –
not original in the slightest. Schwejk makes it non-functioning. It is as if Hašek/Edzard were saying ‘no
codified secret communication system will ever be effective’. I don’t believe
this, since narrative films rely on codified communication – movie conventions.
I wonder if some judicious reviewing of Hašek’s satire is in order.
Reviewed at Sands
Cinema, 82 Saint Marychurch Street, Rotherhithe, South East London, Friday 10
January 2020, 19:30 screening
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