“I’m Milos Hrma. I’ve tried to kill myself because I’m suffering from premature ejaculation. But that’s really not so. Even though I flop every time, I’m a real man.”

‘Closely Observed Trains’, directed by Jiří Menzel in 1966, is a Czechoslovak drama set in a small town during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in the Second World War. Václav Neckář plays Miloš Hrma, a young apprentice guard in a minor train station. Hrma is taken under the wing of Hubička, a worldly but apparently lazy dispatcher who turns out to be working for the resistance. Hrma also has a girlfriend, but suffers from premature ejaculation which drives him to seek help from his co-workers. Ultimately, Hrma’s innocent troubles are punctured by the violence of Hubička work against the Germans. It’s a film that moves uneasily between pathos and comedy and violent and shocking drama. We see the events through Hrma’s eyes and the incidents in his life are, on the surface, minor and comic, particularly his efforts to cure his sexual dysfunction, but this perspective and the intimacy we are allowed in seeing Hrma’s life, makes the more serious occurrences all the more resonant. The film says complex things about the nature of heroism. The characters are not traditional resistance fighters, and the small town setting means that the presence of the war is restricted to the trains that move through the station. Menzel’s movie is humane and balanced, somehow managing to be frivolous and comedic as well as profound and cuttingly dramatic – the ending focusing on the attempts to blow up a train is as dramatic as anything seen in a war thriller.

Would I recommend it? Yes – it’s a classic of the Czech New Wave as well as being a fun and diverting movie. Watch in a double bill with Andrzej Wajda’s ‘Ashes and Diamonds’.