ET Watch Home, a monthly movie essay

For May, Jiří Menzel’s Larks on a String

Paid subscribers get two extra issues a month. One of those is ET Watch Home, a monthly movie essay. This year, each of the movies is a Czech (or, if you prefer, Czechoslovak) New Wave staple. This month, we have Jiří Menzel’s Larks on a String (1969, but also,1990).

Menzel is one of my favorite directors. I binged his movies last summer and wrote an essay about it. But the reason I decided to pick his movies to binge is that I vaguely remembered watching and enjoying Larks on a String in college. I rewatched it for my Menzel binge and have watched it two more times since, which is to say that I’ve watched Larks on a String three times in the past year. It’s one of my favorite movies ever made.

According to an interview that Menzel did (it’s included as one of the bonus features on the Larks on a String DVD), this movie, unlike many others he made, was his idea. In other words, in this case, nobody came to him and said, “what if you made this movie.” For this movie, he approached others with the concept.