Il gioco della mela

Vera Chytilova's first film after she'd been banned from the screen several years by the ever-fickle censors--which ended so many Czech directorial careers outright after Prague Spring--is a basically apolitical farce that nonetheless has some of her usual anarchic playfulness. Fellow director Jiri Menzel plays the typically self-absorbed male doctor who is continually run rings around by the women around him, including the one he impregnates--and decides he's willing to commit to only when she's realized she's better off without him.

The role-reversed battle-of-the-sexes stuff is amusing if not terribly interesting or original (at least anymore), and the film suffers from what appears to be a low budget--it's technically a little rough by her standards, and thus not as stylish. There are a few inspired moments (notably the heroine's over-the-top expression of clothes-shedding free-spiritedness during a countryside outing), but this strikes me as a relatively minor work, even though it's an interesting timepiece. And, needless to say, it's a lot less smirky and more feminist (if not necessarily more "sophisticated") than most sex comedies of its era.