Milos Forman – Memphis Flyer

This week, Indie Memphis continues its collaboration with Memphis In May with the debut film from a director who has an intimate connection with Memphis.

Loves Of A Blonde

Long before Milos Forman brought the The People vs Larry Flynt production to the Bluff City and made hometown hero Jerry Lawler a movie star with Man on the Moon, he was one of the founding members of the Czech New Wave. His debut film Loves of a Blonde would not look out of place in the indie film world today. It’s a low-key romantic comedy about the trial and tribulations of young people trying to find love in a confusing world. Based on stories from Forman and friend’s lives, it was shot on location in a small Czech town with a largely non-professional cast. Two years after its European release, it was nominated for Best Foreign Film at the 1967 Academy Awards.

The show starts at 7 p.m. at Malco Ridgeway. You can get your tickets in advance at the Indie Memphis website. Here’s a fan-made trailer, to give you a taste of the atmosphere.

The Loves of a Blonde (1965) trailer from Richard Lohr on Vimeo.

Milos Forman’s Debut Loves of a Blonde Screens Tonight

Goya’s Ghosts is not a movie about Spanish artist Francisco Goya the way that Girl with a Pearl Earring was about Vermeer, so banish that expectation right away. It’s less about the artist than a film that uses Goya as entrée into the world he depicted. The film does as advertised, putting front and center his sinister, bizarre, ghoulish images — the sinners in the hands of an angry Catholic Church and in the midst of war — his ghosts, in other words.

In the film, Goya (Stellan Skarsgård) is brought to the attention of the Spanish Inquisition for his evil-looking prints. Inquisitor Brother Lorenzo (Javier Bardem) says not to burn the messenger at the stake for his message: the Godlessness Goya reports is real and must be eradicated. Meanwhile, another has drawn the interest of the Inquisition: Inés (Natalie Portman, shocking and delightful, in one of her best performances), Goya’s muse and a suspected Jew.

Goya’s Ghosts, directed by Milos Forman, does nearly everything right. As a condemnation of modern politics (nailing everything from monarchy to theocracy to Nazism to communism to American adventurism), the film shows no mercy. As a biopic, it doesn’t overstep its bounds: No explanation is given for Goya’s artistic visions except that they’re the only logical conclusion an eyewitness could come to. As historical recreation, the film fascinates.

The script has trouble finding a mission statement, but this plays as a strength. Eschewing formula, the film provides instead a story with a beginning, middle, and end both true to its setting and unmoored from a historical milieu.

As Lorenzo says, “There will be no liberty for the enemies of liberty.” Mostly, the film shows the lunacy of fighting one extreme with another. The only side Goya’s Ghosts finds sympathy for is the victims’. And, in the end, all that survives is madness.

Opens Friday, August 24th, at

Ridgeway Four