The Shop on Main St.

The past five years has seen a renaissance of the cinema in Eastern Europe, with most of the activity located in Czechoslovakia. The wide range of content and style in the modern Czech cinema indicates the importance of that renaissance. At one end of the spectrum we find Milos Forman, director of Peter and Paula and A Blond in Love, whose gentle touch conveys exquisitely subtle shifts of mood. At the other end stands the team of Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos, who have created in The Shop on Main Street a film of enormous impact and meaning.

The plot concerns a poor Czechoslovakian farmer named Tono Britko who becomes the "Arvan manager" of a button shop owned by Mrs. Lautmann, an aging Jewess. The other Jews in the village pay Britko to protect the old woman until deportation orders bring an end to the arrangement. Britko must then decide whether he will hide Mrs. Lautmann from the Nazis or protect himself by sending her away.

Britko's agony of conscience becomes everyman's agony as the film, initially a simple piece of village comedy, shifts into social criticism and ultimately into tragedy. As Kadar once said, the story of Mrs. Lautmann "could be transplanted to a Negro woman in Alabama, or a woman awaiting deportation to Siberia in Stalinist Russia, but why should we go outside our own country?" Kadar's genius, however, consists in focusing upon Britko, the best of the typical villagers. When Britko finally breaks down, the social order of the village has reached its nadir.

This is surely not The Nuremburg Trials; The Shop on Main Street gains its power by restricting itself to the study of one village. Hitler is hardly mentioned. Instead we are constantly reminded that the soldiers and henchmen are Czechoslavakian themselves, often residents of the village. The film thus shows us jealous neighbor persecuting more fortunate neighbor in an almost vigilante fashion. The topic is indeed timely for, if we can believe C. L. Sulzberger, this kind of persecution is taking place today throughout Southeast Asia, particularly in Indonesia, where the overseas Chinese and other minority groups are constantly subject to attack under the guise of anti-Communism.

To emphasize their point, the directors use the camera as the eyes of Tono Britko. We view the world through a rum glass as Britko dances in a drunken stupor and we awake with him the next morning to find the camera turned upside down. Soon we become vicarious inhabitants of his village. We walk next to him along the main street as he tips his hat to friends and we cringe with him when a troop of Nazi soldiers passes by.

The music likewise mirrors Britko's thoughts. When he looks up at a church steeple, "Gloria in Excelsis Deo" briefly enters the soundtrack. A bittersweet fiddler's tune of his dilemma, while a full choral anthem accompanies his moment of decision. Finally, the cheerful and ubiquitous band music characterizes the optimism about human nature which Kadar and Klos insist on maintaining through the entire film.

One only wonders why other countries have failed to produce films as penetrating. Why, for instance, has no American moviemaker yet captured the ordeal of the man of conscience in a typical Southern town? Perhaps The Shop on Main Street could only come from Eastern Europe which presently exists in that great grey area between freedom and suppression. But, for my part, I think the answer lies in the sensitivity and the richness of experience of the Czech people themselves, as evidenced in this film. When better films are made, the Czechoslovakians will probably make them.