Ludvík Jahn, the central character of one of the darkest existential films of the Czechoslovak New Wave, ultimately finds himself in crisis, standing at the very edge of a precipice. His plan for revenge against one of the people who stole his youth doesn’t pan out as he had expected, and he now feels even more humiliated, wretched and forsaken than the time his friends expelled him from university at a Communist party meeting. Like Kundera in his novel, the director also shows the hero in a state of stagnation, imprisoned by bitter memories: we witness his train of thought via a series of sharp cuts which continually weave scenes of past absurdities and injustices into the present. Using a masterfully understated, pure film language, Jireš is able to convey to his audience all the fundamental themes of Kundera’s novel. We are thus presented with festering visions of lives forever marked by the terror of the 1950s, of the decline of the countryside and its traditions, the spiritual and material decay of an entire era, and of warped human relationships. And arching over this pervasive image of the Czech past is the great eternal question: what right does a person have to take justice into his own hands?