Ja milujem, ty miluješ (1989)

It is the story of Pišta, an aging bachelor who lives with his mother in a village and works for the railway postal service alongside his best friend Vinco and Vinco’s girlfriend, Viera. While Vinco is a real Don Juan, constantly philandering and breaking the lovestruck Viera’s heart, little, pot-bellied Pišta has no success with women, so he drowns his sorrows in alcohol. Besides the main characters, several supporting characters help create the village setting’s tragicomic atmosphere. Whether they work for the railway post or live in the village, they are all ordinary people on the margins of society, with ordinary problems and desires. The women suffer from their husbands’ infidelity and alcoholism, while the men deal with both their joys and sorrows over a drink. They all have their strengths and flaws, and they all long for understanding and love. The story is not built around dramatic twists, but around small, mostly comic situations through which we come to know the characters. Hanák is interested in ordinary people. Through them, he searches for genuine values and humanity. In a simple, raw setting among “ugly” people, he finds the poetry of life. For his distinctive style, he chooses actors who seem thoroughly natural and do not stand out from the crowd—the kinds of people we might commonly meet on the street. That is also why he chose less familiar faces among foreign actors here: the Polish actor Roman Klosowski (Vinco) and the Serbian actor Milan Jelic (Pišta). Together with the Czech actress Iva Janžurová, whose performance shows none of her usual comic style, they portray their characters with real naturalism. As Zdeněk Figura writes: “There are no beautiful ‘stars’ or muscular leading men in Hanák’s film.” The regime criticized Hanák’s aesthetic of ugliness at the time the film was made. As he himself said in an interview: “They thought it was outrageous to show the conditions in which the working class lived, but they didn’t know those places. In Pink Dreams they didn’t want a Roma settlement; in this film, they missed, for example, a housing estate as proof of the regime’s achievements. I had, after all, previously had Bratislava station’s first platform repainted, where we filmed, so it wouldn’t look so awful.”