A furious attack on Stalinism, militarism and machismo which cost the young female director dearly. Wasted Sunday was banned and the maker was blacklisted. It would be twenty years before she made another film (which is also included in this festival): The Metamorphoses of my Friend Eva).îThe film is a good example of Czech Nouvelle Vague. In a complex, fragmented and harsh style Wasted Sunday describes a day (a Sunday… a sweltering, deadly-boring Sunday) in the life of an alcoholic small-town macho-officer. Henry Sheehan (The Hollywood Reporter): ‘Filmed in harsh black-and-white, the deliberately unattractive shooting style adds to the sense of subversion and revolt’.The officer Ernest (convincingly played by Ivan Paluch) sleeps off his intoxication and is plagued by nightmares. Much of the film consists of his dreams and reminiscences in the form of flashbacks. Ernest lives in a small and uncomfortable room in the army barracks. He lives alone and has a relationship with Mary, a bar-keeper. She loves him, but Ernest is mainly interested in her drink and money. He is imprisoned in a vicious circle of drinking and sleeping off his hang-over. His life only seems to offer boredom and as a reaction he terrorises his surroundings. For instance he arrests two girls for sunbathing on a military base. The girls are however more emancipated that he is, so his feelings of frustration only get bigger.The film-maker is obviously not only interested in the individual case of Ernest. The officer represents the military and political repression within communist Czechoslovak society. The ban on the film only served to underline this.
