Little kids, little worries, big kids, big worries, sighs many a parent often. This is no different for the mother of eighteen-year-old Frantisek, who has just graduated from high school without much glory and is about to start his first job. Fandy is still full of boyish dreams, yearns for a career as a rowing representative, competes with a friend for the favor of an admiring girl and is generally stubbornly opposed to taking life seriously.
Acting
Bohumír Starý's gangly, desperate charm carries every scene.
Direction
Kachyňa's warm eye finds poetry in factory towns and rowing clubs.
Director
Karel Kachyňa
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Starý was a real rower, not an actor—Kachyňa cast him for authenticity and his magnificent awkwardness.
Made during normalized Czechoslovakia, the film's softness was itself political—refusing socialist-realist heroism for ordinary stasis.
XC
