Dir. Karel Kachnya, Czechoslovakia, 1965, 133 minutes, subtitled
Cast: Zdeněk Lstibůrek, Naděžda Gajerová, Vlado Müller, Gustáv Valach
Review by Colin Dibben
It is Spring 1945 and, in rural Moravia, the Nazis are withdrawing as the Soviets approach. But the big picture is of little interest to 10 year old Ordrich (Lstibůrek). He has enough on his plate with the local boys bullying him and his father beating him, as well as the warmer side of life: his mother, the family horse, a friendly neighbour’s dog and her puppies. But the war is slowly destroying everything that impinges on Ordrich’s consciousness – what will be left when this community is ‘liberated’?
There are several surprising aspects to Long Live the Republic! With a title like that, it is odd how downbeat the film is about the arrival of Soviet forces. Their troops are kinder than the Germans we see (to Ordrich at least), but their arrival brings out scapegoating and hypocritical violence amongst the villagers. This is certainly no celebration of the Great Patriotic War. In fact, the higher class villagers who welcome the liberators are shown to be the same people that fraternised with the Nazis.
The fever dream pitch of the film is also unusual in its consistency. This feverish energy suggests the foregrounding of Ordich’s youthful perspective, but it also jars nicely with all the cruelty on display.
Stylistically, Ordrich’s exuberance is suggested by dynamic, handheld camera sequences in which he rides a bike around the village, trying to escape his young tormentors. These Cinemascope sequences fizz with a dark energy. The rest of the film is packed with fine examples of the more sedate side of Cinemascope: well composed, painterly landscape shots.
This move reflects the major surprise in this film: it cuts between present events, past memories and fantasies in Ordrich’s mind. When he is caught and manhandled by Russian soldiers, the film cuts mid-sequence to previous scenes of Ordrich being tormented and then cuts again, to a sort of languorous fantasy resolution. It tends to be these fantasy images that are lyrical and well composed. The harsh but striking editing gives equal weight to reality and Ordrich’s memories and fantasies. It is a powerful formal move that relates the mind of a traumatised youth to the very nature of cinema.
The apparatus and visible damage of war are not shown that much. Instead we have lovely symbolic shots of rural life, shorn of some of its rules: a pack of wild horses running through open countryside, a wounded horse floundering on a muddy track, puppies lost in the detritus of a ransacked farmyard.
Lstibůrek’s anguished ‘old man’ face reminded me of David Bennent’s Oskar in Volker Schlondorff’s The Tin Drum (1980) and there are also obvious resonances with the risible The Painted Bird (2019). But this feels much more like the real thing: a film that captures something true about how a child might experience war. I’d say that from this perspective, Long Live the Republic! is also a greater film than Tarkovsky’s rather stagey Ivan’s Childhood. At the same time it has an energy and the focus on a bygone rural era that is reminiscent of Paradjanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, also from 1965. What a grand couple of years there for Eastern European cinema, with Andrei Rublev in 1966!
Long Live the Republic! is not an easy watch but it is as beautiful and energetic as it is disturbing.
Long Live the Republic! is out on Blu-ray from Second Run on 16 March 2026
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