New Movies: The Way the Ball Bounces

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In an unfree society, there are no innocent words. Congeries of meanings attach themselves to every noun used in an effort to dodge censorship. A spade is not merely a spade when it is raised as a symbol of defiance. A story is no longer simply a story when it is also a parable of men oppressed.

Director Milos Forman (Loves of a Blonde) made The Firemen's Ball, a delicious parody-fable of Slavic bureaucracy, in pre-Dubcek Czechoslovakia. In the film, a group of firemen stage a ball to give their retiring chief a gold-plated hatchet. The dance begins with a traditional polka, but before long everyone is moving to the themes of ridicule and absurdity.

A house burns to the ground while the late-arriving firemen fling futile handfuls of snow on it; ever so solicitously they move its tenant close to the flames so that he can stay warm. Back at the party, a hilarious beauty contest dissolves into chaos: the girls are not only all sure losers, but they also prove too shy to compete. Every raffle prize—not to mention the chiefs hatchet —has been stolen.

The party, of course, is the Party, and the participants its functionaries and scroungers. But the film has lived through three Czechoslovak eras, and its meaning has changed accordingly. Initially, it was a witty editorial on lifestyle in Eastern Europe. After the coming of Dubcek, it could be enjoyed as broad comedy as well as trenchant comment. With the Russian occupation, the farce is suddenly open to newer and darker interpretations—of men too weak and ill-equipped to fight, while liberty and hard-won independence are stolen or reduced to ashes.

It is a tragedy that The Firemen's Ball has had to play on three different levels. It is Forman's directorial triumph that the film has succeeded on all of them.