A village near Prague after the end of World War II. Eda (11) lives with his father, an electric engineer, and mother. Eda likes to play with his friend Tonda, but since their all-boys class lacks discipline, the school principal hires a former Nazi resistance member as the new teacher, Igor Hnizdo. Igor sometimes hits the hands of the boys with his stick, but the boys still adore him due to his stories about World War II, even though nobody can confirm at which unit he served. Igor has an affair with the wife of the tram driver, and even seems to be seducing Eda's mother. When news spread that Igor got two twin teenage girls pregnant, he is suspended from school, but reinstalled when it turns out to be rumor. For the anniversary of the liberation of the Allies, Igor stages a World War II school play with the boys as actors.
''The Elementary School'' is a typical example of 'Czech humor', consisting out of wacky situations and unusual characters without a tight plot, and is instead just a 'slice-of-life' collection, set here in nostalgic past times. Luckily, the director Jan Sverak and his dad, the screenwriter Zdenek Sverak, refuse to treat it as purely innocent nostalgia, instead defying and avoiding the cliches thanks to naughty humor (after all, the 11-year old boys are entering puberty) and concessions that there were bad things in the past, as well. The opening sequence is already amusing and clever: in the exteriors, a combat vehicle is seen driving across a meadow as gunshots are heard and explosions seen around it, while two little boys are seen inside, seemingly driving it—all until Eda's mother is heard calling them to get back home, as the two boys exit and it is revealed it was all just their fantasy, as they were just sitting in an abandoned old combat vehicle on some abandoned property.
The first half of the movie consists mostly out of Eda and other boys doing either pranks or just plain silly things to amuse themselves in this boring, desolate village. In one scene, they ignite a mortar out of curiosity, but its missile just barely ejects and starts sliding on the ground through its exhaust pipe, passing under the legs of scared people who found themselves on the meadow. Eda has to take care of his sibling, so he simply attaches the baby on a cart to his bicycle—and naturally has to drive downhill of a rugged terrain, not caring that much what happens to the cart behind him. And there is the classic curiosity error when three boys lick a metal pole during winter and get stuck, so the principal orders an assistant to use a blow torch to melt the frost and release them, but part of their flesh from their tongues is left on the ice surface. Sverak crafts an episodic, messy structure, but loses his steam in the finale, since the abrupt ending feels incomplete and unfinished, whereas too much time is invested on the womanizer teacher Igor, when focusing more on Eda and his friends or family would have been more logical, instead. This is a very good movie, yet it seems something is still missing in the end.
Grade:+++
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