The Cassandra Cat (An American's Guide to Czech Movies) (Patreon)

Thanks to the Little Theater in Rochester, New York, who happened to be screening this movie just as I was planning to write about it.

A lady in red removes her cat’s sunglasses, causing the people of a repressed Czech town to turn bright colors and cavort like madmen in long, dialogue-free dance montages. Now imagine a movie where that’s about 50% of what happens, and you’ve more or less got The Cassandra Cat.

Five years before the Soviets took Prague, daft little Czech oddities like The Cassandra Cat were winning awards at Cannes. The Cassandra Cat doesn’t quite fall into the Czech New Wave (which is hardly a concrete movement so much as a retroactively applied moniker) — it predates that era’s greatest works, and has an optimism absent from The Firemen’s Ball or Daisies. It depicts a Soviet-style local government getting overthrown by magic and the stubbornness of children. In every possible way, this has more in common with Mary Poppins than The Cremator. This was a final moment where folklore and the uncanny felt like it could overthrow the Soviet Union. The Cassandra Cat isn’t more defiant than its successors, but it’s differently defiant.

Certainly describing this film is less interesting than watching it. There are slightly over-long dance sequences where characters are enveloped by Eastmancolor, turning red and blue and yellow, embracing their true selves after a cat gives them permission to. It’s deeply silly, overstays its welcome, and fills a vital place in Czech cinema. Effects-driven fantasy films like this and the work of Jiří Trnka and Karel Zeman demonstrate Czech cinema’s relationship to puppetry and theater, and how Czech films operated more in that tradition than outside national borders. To American viewers, this is a cute Central European fantasy movie. For Czechs, it’s a final victorious burst of Czech folk magic.