The time is 1945-46. 10 year old Eda and his friend Tonda live in a small village outside Prague. In school, their class is so wild and indisciplined that their teacher quits and is replaced by the militant Igor Hnidzo. He is very strict – but also very fair. His weakness though, is his interest in young women.
The theatre director encounters the disinterest and irresponsibility of the acting troupe, whose members are scheming and looking for side income. The tired and sick artist wants to finish his work at any cost.
At the beginning was the Slovak television series Lekár umierajúceho czasu (Doctor of Dying Time), dedicated to the Rudolphine-era scientist Jan Jesenius. He ended up on the scaffold along with other gentlemen after losing the anti-Habsburg uprising. When director Miloslav Luther conceived the idea of making an abridged version of the footage for cinema, he had to not only rebuild the storyline but also dub it into Czech. However, the result was only an illustrative puzzle, describing the various stages of the hero's turbulent life.
Young prisoner Jan, nicknamed Roughboy (Petr Cepek), tries to commit suicide. He was imprisoned for a fight in which he injured a functionary of the National Committee and for stealing material but actually by the blame for this crime was pinned on him by the road-builders in whose group he worked. The prison doctor knows that Jan is an emotionally deprived person who never knew his parents and spent all his childhood - except one year with foster-parents - in orphanages, homes for youth and reform schools. He arranges a five-day holiday for Jan, who wants to find his mother's grave.
The film tells the story of an enthusiastic young man who joins a textile factory in the late 1950s and assumes that a promising career awaits him - the protagonist is therefore constantly comparing himself to his favourite literary model, the equally ambitious Julian Sorel from Stendhal's fresco The Red and the Black. The result, however, lacks the necessary conviction, the ability to draw the viewer into his world, and remains too contrived, as the chosen period has become a mere non-committal backdrop for amorous games.
Petr Čepek was a Czech actor associated with The Drama Club in Prague. His final film was Faust, directed by Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer. Cepek attended the Academy of Performing Arts (DAMU) along with many notable Czech actors of the time, before appearing in Ostrava’s first theater, DPB until 1965. After joining with fellow colleagues in Prague’s Činoherní Klub, where he contributed to the formation of numerous famous theatre productions such as Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Gogo’s Revizor (The Government Inspector). Čepek turned to politics in the late 1980s, participating in political rallies and negotiations before returning to the Academy of Performing Arts (DAMU) to teach until his death in 1994. Čepek was honored posthumously for his double role in the Švankmajers film Faust.
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