On demand: "The Ear/Ucho"

Filmed under the noses of the Soviets and consequently withheld from the eyes of the viewing public for twenty years, 1970's odd but effective political fable The Ear shuttles back and forth between the rooms of one Prague household, conveying as it goes the perilous position many Czechs found themselves in at the moment of its making. A Government minister (Radoslav Brzobohatý) returns home from a broadly typical high-society function and finds he's both keyless and powerless, a source of particular annoyance to the wife at his side (Jiřina Bohdalová). More curious still: once the couple eventually get inside the house, they find their electricity may be off, but the lights are still on in a neighbour's property. So they're very much in the dark, and co-writer/director Karel Kachyňa's illuminating flashbacks begin to tell the tale of what actually went down at the night's big party, reframed now as a hotbed of scheming and plotting that may well have something to do with the pair's present predicament. The mind immediately goes to Miloš Forman's The Firemen's Ball, from a few years earlier, except that these festivities have turned somehow sinister, with a lot of talking behind backs in euphemisms and coded whispers. Having spent the evening being in with the regime's in-crowd, our protagonist will now spend the wee small hours not just sleepless but out in the cold, apparently designated as an enemy of the State.

What Kachyňa was working towards - and gets - is a potent idea of being under surveillance, under suspicion and under threat; these 95 minutes describe a state of psychological siege in which even boozy, after-midnight chatter between a husband and wife might prove somebody's undoing. The married parties come to turn against one another; we sense how even a well-placed functionary isn't safe in this set-up (in large part because he is so well-placed); and the darkness of the house leads us to wonder and worry whether someone's physically waiting in the shadows. (There's barely any let-up once power is restored to the property around the halfway mark: now this couple appear hopelessly exposed.) If we become edgy, too, it's because this camera functions both as a sympathetic ear, recognising what it is to have to live under these pressures, and a silent co-conspirator, recording everything for the powers-that-be. By the end of this long dark night of the Communist soul, it's got brutal, bearing down so heavily on the superb lead performers that it threatens to shatter the very foundations of this marriage: the closing stretch is a Bergman movie where Big Brother has usurped God, leaving poisonous ideology in the place of vacillating faith. A textbook example of a small, self-contained story elevated and expanded by canny craft and technique, what's most thrilling and daring about it is that Kachyňa would himself have been at great risk of returning home from any cast-and-crew screening to find an unmarked car parked on his street and his name on some sort of list.

The Ear is now streaming via YouTube.