A Boring Afternoon

Black and white, 35 mm
Czechoslovakia, 1964, 16 min
Section: Tribute to Ivan Passer

Synopsis

The film A Boring Afternoon is a comic yet melancholic sketch describing the atmosphere of a Sunday afternoon in a pub on the outskirts of Prague. A few old regulars are passing the time of day, others have dropped in for a drink, while the local football club is playing a vital match to stay in the league. The story is founded on the unusual concurrence and contrast of varied fragments of conversation, song, trivial situations, gestures, silences and facial expressions which reflect the personality of the individual characters and their relationships with others. Four elderly ladies are playing rummy and singing sentimental songs from a bygone era; the landlord is exasperated by a disrespectful young lad who is reading a trashy novel; the morose Jupa nervously washes down his heart pills with beer while desperately lagging behind in a high-status dialogue about football with a customer bearing a pot of sauerkraut; the windows facing the street afford a view of a handbag-wielding woman “with enough curves and proportions to wake the dead”. A Boring Afternoon was awarded at the festivals in Mannheim and Locarno, and the French film journal Positif wrote the following: “All of a sudden, the greyness generates something unusual. The seeming absence of structure is replaced by secret chords, a singular climate, a certain quality of tempo and light in which we find the artist.” The film A Boring Afternoon  was part of the “generation manifesto” of the New Wave, Pearls of the Deep (Perličky na dně, 1965), based on Bohumil Hrabal’s early prose works.