Cinequest: LOST IN MUNICH

LOST IN MUNICH
LOST IN MUNICH

Ah, those nutty Czechs.  Here, we think we’re watching a political spoof. Then, a third of the way in, Lost in Munich becomes a mockumentary on the “making of” the movie we thought we were watching.  The joke is on us and on the incompetent and unlucky fillmmaker characters and on the Czechs themselves.

There’s a particular dry deadpan in some Czech cinema, and the best example may be a Cinequest film from two years ago, Polski Film.  The Czechs are happy to make fun of themselves and their European neighbors (in this case the French). The movie-within-a-movie centers on Czech hard feelings from French Prime Minister Edoaurd Daladier selling out the Czechs in the 1938 Munich Agreement with Hitler.  A dim French diplomat tries to smooth things over by bringing Daladier’s 80-year-old pet parrot, but the parrot turns out to be counterproductively politically incorrect, the parrot is parrotnapped, and the comic absurdity of Lost in Munich goes on from there.

Lost in Munich is pretty successful when it mocks the making of a snake-bitten movie where everything that CAN go wrong…You’ll probably like this movie if you have a taste for absurdist cinema.  Lost in Munich plays Cinequest again on March 11 and 12.

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