Scott Reviews Miloš Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball [Arrow Films Blu-ray Review]

Emerging as some demented second cousin of contemporaries Jacques Tati and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Miloš Forman’s landmark 1967 comedy The Firemen’s Ball is about a disaster of a party, the complete inability and casual disinterest in resuscitating it. The general idea is to host a party with a raffle and beauty pageant to help out the volunteer fire department in a small Czechoslovak town. They throw in a ceremony in honor of their former chairman as a way to lend the affair some dignity. Any question of dignity quickly goes out the window. The raffle prizes are stolen, the potential beauties deemed somewhat underwhelming, and their beloved chairman is largely forgotten, left sitting in a corner by himself until sporadically directed to approach to the stage at the wrong time entirely.

More learned writers than I can – and have – placed the film in a larger Communist context, arguing for or against its status as allegory. The idea of an institution created with good intentions slowly unraveling as the governing body tries to patch over its failures certainly lends itself to such a reading, but one which will inevitably seem small in retrospect. What makes The Firemen’s Ball an enduring film is its focus on the small human foibles that do them in each step of the way. Those guarding the raffle table are too distracted by food or sex. Those tasked with putting together a beauty pageant turn lecherous and authoritarian. Even something as simple as the hanging of a sign results in a small fire, and that’s not the last bit of ironic fun to be had. These behaviors are not endemic to any form of government. People just tend to become a little petty when given a little power.

This comes through most clearly in the beauty pageant sections of the film, when it comes mostly closely to the classic “endorsement or depiction” conundrum. On the one hand, Forman doesn’t cast his film with knock-out beauties that the men are nitpicking over. Not all of the women at the party are attractive. This is a small town, and there’s no reason to expect they would be, except Foreman plants the idea in the firemen’s heads through a magazine spread with dozens of beauties. The comedy comes from their distorted hopes, and by casting the women as he does, Forman calls attention to the silliness of the beauty pageant at all, the degree to which men value a woman’s looks above all else, and how societies acquiesce to that. None of the women seem to take the pageant very seriously, and many are reluctant to participate at all. But there’s a sense that one should be a “good sport” that drives them along regardless. For anyone to say “maybe not?” would be perceived as rude, and there’s some internalized belief that it’s better to subject oneself to passive cruelty (in this case, the firemen) than provide any kind of backlash.

Forman’s comfort in letting this sort of cultural insight simply rest in comedy, rather than overemphasizing it, is the real pleasure of the film. The laughs come along with the observations we can glean about groups of people, individual agendas, and the shortsighted approach we often take when attempting larger goals. I had a blast watching this movie, but it’s these observations and insights that really made it stick.

Working from a 4k restoration by the Czech National Film Archive, under the supervision of cinematographer Miroslav Ondíek, Arrow Films (under their Arrow Academy label) have done a remarkable job bringing this film to (region FREE!) Blu-ray. The “About the Restoration” section in the booklet greatly details the work that went into making this film look as close as possible to how it was originally exhibited. The results have paid off tremendously, with a very warm, crisp, detailed image that very closely mimics 35mm, with a good deal of grain, imperfect focus, and stray (though rare) bits of hairs or specks. I didn’t notice anything in the way of crushed blacks or other compression artifacts. (screencaps courtesy of DVD Beaver)

Arrow includes an appreciation by Czech film scholar David Sorfa, archival interviews with Forman, Ondiek, and co-writer Ivan Passer, and a video essay by Michael Brooke on the non-professional actors who proliferated the Czech New Wave cinema. That last one is easily the most impressive, taking a wide survey of the films of the time and calling attention to a lot of actors who make a huge impression, but whom the casual viewer (including myself) might not think to remember. The other supplements are helpful, but rarely revelatory. The booklet contains an essay by film scholar Peter Hames and excerpts from British reviews at the time of the film’s opening. Arrow’s really made the latter a staple of their booklets, and it’s gradually become a highlight for me.

I never saw this film in theaters or on DVD, but Arrow’s Blu-ray is an excellent way to get into the film, and, based on screencaps, is a substantial upgrade from previous editions. Though not stacked with supplements, there’s more than enough here to get a sense of the socio-political context in which the film was produced and the effect it had at the time, as well as how it fit into the larger Czech New Wave movement. All in all, another fine package from Arrow.