The Joke = Zert [NTSC]

Based on Milan Kundera’s novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, “The Joke” is a blunt parable about the Stalinist era’s absurd insistence that every individual must, at every moment, act with the political party in mind. In the early 1950s, Louis Jahn’s studies, career and life have been disrupted beyond repair as a result of a “politically incorrect” joke he played. Fifteen years later, Louis sees a unique chance to revenge himself upon the Communist party official that bought him down. But the times have changed and life proves to be more complicated than he had expected. Jaromil Jires was one of the preeminent Czech directors of the period, and “The Joke” was one of the key works of the Czech New Wave, a highly politicised film movement that emerged in the 1960s only to be savagely repressed by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslavakia in 1968. “The Joke” was finished just before the Soviet tanks moved in to Prague and was condemned by the new government. As a result the film went largely unseen, even in its own country, for nearly two decades.