Lost in Criterion

We're headed back to Czechoslovakia this week for a few rounds with prolific Czech director Milos Forman. First up is Loves of a Blonde, Forman's 1965 comedy about a working class girl in need of...distraction. It's possibly the best known film of the Czech New Wave, and for good reason.

What happens when a man is so singularly obsessed with possessing a woman that he doesn't even pay attention to who she is? It's a question possibly only accidentally asked by Luis Bunuel in That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Bunuel's final film, it is also arguably rather autobiographical, and from what we've learned from Bunuel he is the sort of self-deluded fool that thinks he knows himself so well to make a film like this as autobiographical. While it certainly contains Bunuel's common satire of the upperclass, this film subdues his famous surreality into just how people react, or don't react, to what's going on around them. Oh, and the female lead is played by two different women and no one notices. The film is either brilliant or really dumb. Or both.