Set in the waning days of World War II, Karel Kachyňa’s Coach to Vienna is at once a fable, a road movie, and a chamber drama. A text scroll at the start of the 1966 film casually informs us that Krista (Iva Janzurová), a Czech woman whose husband was recently executed by Germans for stealing a bag of cement, is plotting her revenge against two different German soldiers, who’ve deserted their army and are forcing her to escort them to Vienna on her two-horse carriage. While each one of this trio’s national identities is critical to their character, Kachyňa’s tale of the blind hatred and intolerance that plagues soldiers and civilians alike in times of war achieves a mythical quality that lends its core themes a universality that transcends its period setting.
The validity of Krista’s instinctive contempt for her two captors, the badly injured Günther (Ludek Munzar) and the much younger, more naïve Hans (Jaromír Hanzlík), is initially left unquestioned. And as Krista cautiously guides her horses down a road through the perpetually fog-laden forest that may or may not lead the Germans to their desired destination, Kachyňa homes in on the young woman’s gestures and facial expressions as she repeatedly eyes the knife and gun that the soldiers leave carelessly unguarded and the axe that she’s hidden beneath the carriage. Coach to Vienna effectively places the viewer in her headspace through a series of POV shots, inviting us to root, with bated breath, for the young woman to get the chance to take vengeance on these men, who are surely guilty of something.
Like Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Silence de la Mer, though, Coach to Vienna challenges our preconceptions of the Nazi soldier, particularly Hans, who makes a point of telling Krista that he’s from Austria, not Germany, and means her no harm. He even removes the Nazi insignias from his uniform at one point, and while that’s to help avoid detection from the fastly encroaching Russian Army, it’s symbolic of the filmmakers’ desire to humanize the man.
Where Krista remains defiantly silent, an inscrutable force guarding her secret desire for bloodshed, Hans is comically garrulous, spewing out pointless stories and talking endlessly about his hometown and family as he desperately tries to connect with Krista. In one scene, when he hears church bells and music, he even joyfully states that “the war’s over,” further cementing just how strongly he desires to break free from the grips of war.
If Hans, at times, fits squarely into the archetype of the “good German,” his cynical and vehemently racist cohort, Günther, serves to counter his almost doe-eyed innocence. And while Hans’s attempts to bond with Krista feel genuine enough, his happy-go-lucky attitude can also be construed as a willful disconnect from reality, particularly in his obliviousness to Krista’s emotional anguish and disdain for the occupying soldiers.
The decision to set the film entirely within a labyrinthine Czech forest adds to the underlying tension between Krista and her captors. The environment being symbolically shrouded in the fog of war not only gives the film the feel of a twisted fairy tale, but heightens the sense of hopelessness and inescapability of the situation for all parties concerned.
Hans may want to flee his dire circumstances, but the brutal determination of both Krista and Günther, as well as the Czech resistance fighters who arrive later in the film, effectively prevent anyone from escaping undamaged. As such, Coach to Vienna is ultimately less about the physical violence of war than its propensity for emotionally crippling and psychologically warping those whom it touches, breeding distrust, bitterness, and alienation to such a degree that it leaves everyone in its path with no sense of moral direction.
Image/Sound
Second Run’s transfer of a 4K restoration by the Czech National Film Archive is impressive. Much of Coach to Vienna consists of close-ups and tight mid-shots, so the extreme detail in faces is particularly helpful in a film where so much is gleaned from tiny shifts in expression. There’s nary a sign of scratches or blemishes, and the even grain distribution gives the transfer a nicely textured, film-like look. The audio presentation is equally strong, with clean dialogue and a well-balanced mix that boasts terrific fidelity and a nice separation of sounds.
Extras
The audio commentary included here is a lively and fruitful conversation between film historians Mike White, Samm Deighan, and Kat Ellinger. The trio do an excellent job of balancing aesthetic analysis and historical context, discussing Kachyňa’s ability to create a disorienting sense of time and space and contextualizing the film with other Czech New Wave war films from around the same time, such as Closely Watched Trains and The Shop on Main Street. One of the most fruitful through lines in their discussion is the importance of the Czech novel The Good Soldier Švejk, whose influence looms over countless Czech films from the 1960s. The disc also comes with Kachyňa’s feature-length graduation film It’s Not Always Cloudy and a 20-page bound booklet with an essay by Czech cinema specialist Jonathan Owen, who makes a compelling argument for the film’s moral complexity and the importance of co-screenwriter Jan Procházka in his many collaborations with Kachyňa.
Overall
Karel Kachyňa’s morally murky World War II parable gets a striking transfer and an illuminating commentary courtesy of Second Run.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
