Autumn Spring

It’s difficult to find a way to describe this modest Czech film without making it sound a little too cute. Fanda and his friend Ed are two old codgers, retired opera singers who never graduated from the chorus and who spend their days acting out harmless role-playing pranks. Some of these are brief improvised jokes, like pretending to be ticket inspectors in a subway station, and some are a little grander, as when Fanda pretends to be a visiting maestro from the New York Metropolitan Opera, looking to buy a mansion. Though Ed is a willing partner, Fanda seems to relish these real-life performances most.

But while he’s living a life of contented denial, heading toward his octogenarian years seemingly without a care, his wife Emilie is the exact opposite. Her main concern is that she save up enough money so that she and her husband can have decent funerals. Fanda is a lovable old scamp and Emilie is a party-pooping scold, so once again we have a film which posits that a life of fantasy makes you happy and attractive while those who keep their eye on reality become petty and uptight and difficult to be around — which is probably true as
often as it’s not.

The already-strained relationship between Fanda and Emilie reaches a critical point when a debt incurred from a backfired scheme leads him to steal some money from her funeral fund. Encouraged by their son Jara, whose dream is to see the two in a retirement home so he can have their apartment, Emilie decides to get a divorce. After 45 years, enough is enough.

What keeps all this from being cloying is a sensitivity that seems distinctly Eastern European, a streak of pessimistic resignation running just beneath the droll surface. Fanda is played by Vlastimil Brodsky, a veteran Czech actor who died shortly after filming. With his owlish demeanor and outsized ears, he seems like some sort of mischievous troll grown to human proportions. But there’s a lurking sadness beneath his blithe exterior, which emerges when Fanda tries to reform in order to save his marriage; the playfulness disappears and he seems like just another old duffer waiting to die. Despite a much too cuddly ending, Autumn Spring is upbeat in a complicated way, a story of perseverance told with humor but with a continual tug of seriousness, which prevents the narrative from floating into whimsy.