A Czech village just after World War II. Two kids find a gun and randomly shoot with it. A farmer finds a landmine in his field, so the villagers detonate it in a quarry. 1 9 4 8 Czechoslovak coup d'état: organist Očenáš, the photographer Plecmera, the postman Bertin and Zejvala become Communist loyalists and are thus awarded as the adiminstrators of the village, but the people despise them. Bertin is shot by an unknown assassin, and thus many are arrested. 1 9 5 1 : Zášinek, plagued by guilt for divorcing his Jewish wife who perished in the Holocaust, gets drunk and is killed by a bull. Thief Jořka dies from a wound on his leg. The villagers rally around the honest farmer František who goes against Communists who mismanage the village and want to take further debt. František is sent to prison, released, and then dies from a disease.
Vojtech Jasny's drama that chronicles Czechia under Communist mismanagement, "All My Good Countrymen" is sometimes hailed as one of the best Czech films of the 20th century, but it does not feel that fresh anymore today. Jasny takes on a lyrical, slow, contemplative approach, but it does inevitably come off as boring at times, with several episodes and supporting characters that feel either pointless or unnecessary to the overall plot. At least three sequences are brilliant: the hilarious opening sequence shows a church choir singing a song about evolution ("Billions of years ago, our beautiful world was born... Whirling waters gave it life, cell produced cell... And what happened next?"), with the organist playing music. The anthological scene of local thief Jorka (comedian Vladimir Mensik) falling down and dying on the farm, while thousands of goose feathers cover his body. The cynical assembly hall moment where the Communists read out their plan for the village and then clap to themselves (!)—while the audience, the villagers, just remain sitting there, motionlessly, in defiant silence. Mensik is able to insert a few jokes here and there, for instance in the scene where he plays with a cable: "Soviets plus electrification equals Communism". Jasny takes some key moments from 20th century Czech history and shows them with an elegant ease, so that they often say everything in just simple terms and consequences on the lives of the farmers of this village. One very poignant example is when a farmer with the largest barn is informed that he will be evicted due to collectivization, and one man who is helping him pack his things on a horse carriage admits: "If my farm was just a bit bigger than yours, it would have been me, not you." However, the stream-of-consciousness mood is rather vague, jumping from one segment to another, where not every episode works (the scene of a bull impaling Zasinek is especially poorly done), and the ending is somewhat weak and anticlimactic.
Grade:++
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