The following article was originally published on my website, Czech Film Review. She shares a dorm in a dreary hostel with several other women of her age, and despite the odds has a good-looking boyfriend called Tonda. She wants to believe it. The title may well be ironic.
She is quite worldly compared to some of her friends, but still dreams of love and romance โ we can tell that from the opening scene, where she is cuddled up in bed with one of her friends cooing over the ring. At a village dance, Andula and two friends are approached by three sleazy middle-aged soldiers who are stationed nearby. Their idea of wooing the girls is to get them drunk and take them for a quick knee-trembler in the woods nearbyโฆ.
Nevertheless, they spend the night together and their tender, playful scenes are among the best in the movie. This is most apparent with the three soldiers who, despite their age and experience one is married and loses his ring in a comic set piece bicker and gossip like a trio of schoolboys about approaching the much younger women. Forman is very adept at blending professional and non-professional actors, allowing scenes to play out at length with natural rhythms that give the film a documentary vibe.
The casting of a young amateur actress in the eponymous role is a masterstroke โ her performance is so disarming and unaffected, without any of the actorly tics a professional might have brought to the part.
Her Andula is downtrodden but tough, sceptical yet romantic. The connection with the British New Wave is unmistakable, a movement that paved the way for the social realism of Ken Loach. Overall, Loves of a Blonde is pretty lightweight compared to some of the other key works of the Czech New Wave.
