After former fighter pilot Franta Sláma (Ondrej Vetch) keels over from pneumonia, the commandant of the Communist-run forced-labor camp he's been imprisoned in has no choice but to send him to the infirmary, where he spends a long time convalescing and swapping war stories with a dour former SS doctor--who, surprisingly, turns out to have a ready store of wit and humanity (Hans Jorg Assman).

Franta tells how he and his best student, Karel (Krystof Hádek), fled to England soon after the Nazi invasion, where they trained and fought as members of the RAF. He also relates the sad tale of how he and Karel eventually fell out over a woman, war "widow" Susan (Tara Fitzgerald), who took Karel's virginity but soon fell for Franta's more mature charms.

If you're looking for a good, old-fashioned tale of manly comeraderie and wartime derring-do, you could do a hell of a lot worse than former Foreign Film Oscar-winning Czechloslovakian director Jan Sverák's Dark Blue World (do the words Pearl Harbor ring a bell, maybe?).

Though bookended by the pale grey angst of life in a Communist-run forced labor camp--as post-credits titles explain, all those fighter pilots who flew with the RAF during World War II ended up being detained without trial after the Russians invaded--the bulk of the film takes place during the glory days of our protagonist, Franta (Ondrej Vetch).

The dogfight scenes are exciting, and seem accurate--there are some extremely spectacular crashes, both on land and into the sea, plus a terrifying bomber raid on the training camp--but equal care is lavished on the lazy, gold-and-green vistas of rural England itself, whose proper inhabitants are always cautioning the passionate Czechs to "keep off the grass". "It's amazing how calm they are," Franta's best friend Karel (Krystof Hádek) comments, while watching a team of British WACs keep track of the skirmishes going on miles above them by pushing tiny counters around on a map. "Yes," Franta replies, "and that's what Hitler doesn't understand about them. That's while they'll win."

Possibly so. Sverák retains an interesting kind of ambivalence towards what he obviously sees as his country's national tendency towards hot-headedness throughout, and Franta himself is portrayed as being simultaneously capable of great bravery, unabashed sentiment and little or no impulse control. The former SS doctor who treats his (possibly terminal) pneumonia in the wrap-around segments chastises him--and rightly so--for stealing Karel's first love (Tara Firzgerald), accusing him of seeing the partnership which had saved his life so many times as "a soap bubble--you blow on it, and it disappears."

Yet Franta's excesses, like those of the rest of his squadron, seem to stem mainly from a general over-abundance of rude and vital energy...energy just as easily channelled into winning a war as it is into learning English, making just the right kind of small talk with comely females ("Excuse me, can you tell me the way to the Officers' Mess?"), or scoring a dead pilot's favorite song for the local brass band to play at his funeral.

In the end, it is this excess which seems to sustain him through one of Czechloslovakia's grimmest periods, allowing him to escape in one way or another--possibly through death, possibly through another type of transcendence entirely. As determinedly populist as a World War II-era recruitment poster, Dark Blue World nevetheless does its crowd-pleasing with a welcome verve and grace; it's a simple film about complex themes, as perfectly content to make you laugh, cry and walk out humming the titular 1940's song as you will be--almost inevitably--to let it.

Gemma Files

Jan Sverák began his filmmaking career back in 1984, with Sbohem, Nadrazicko; he made six more films before hitting the Best Foreign Film Academy Award jackpot with interantionally acclaimed tear-jerker Kolya. Dark Blue World is his latest film.