Our man Forman
Where the bird soars

HOW YOU FEEL about this year's Lifetime Achievement Award recipient may depend on which phase of his career you tend to associate him with: Eastern bloc neorealist, literary adapter, Broadway interpreter, or Hollywood's Boswell of the rebellious and famous. Regardless of the various auteur personae Milos Forman has tried on and discarded, there are always two anatomical parts sticking out: a sharp tongue and an extended middle finger. Social criticism is second nature to this darling of '60s Czech new wave, laced with a wicked sense of humor to help the trenchant and occasionally tragic medicine go down. And in most of Forman's endeavors, rewiring society's circuits through artistic disobedience is seen as the ultimate antidote to authority's stranglehold; the Mozarts, the McMurphys, and the merry hippie pranksters of his oeuvre only really seem to come alive as they piss on or dismantle the expectations of staid environments.

Those familiar only with the work that put Oscars on Forman's mantle or made Larry Flynt a cuddly martyr for our masturbatory sins may be surprised by how off-the-cuff his early post-film school movies feel and how sophisticated the satire plays even in its raw state. The one that got him noticed (and his first Oscar nomination, for Best Foreign Film), 1965's Loves of a Blonde, could've been mistaken for a forgotten nouvelle vague gem were it not for the Czech subtitles. But Godard quickly gave way to Gogol for his next picture, The Firemen's Ball, a cutting farce based on a real retirement party Forman and his fellow scenarists attended while holed up in the mountains writing another script. Forman's claim that he was never trying to fashion an allegory ("only a comedy that was true," he later said) in his tale of bumbling bureaucrats, opportunistic townspeople, "beauty" contestants, and inept civil servants is debatable, but either way the statement was lost on the country's new Soviet landlords, who immediately banned the film. The director recognized a repressive regime when he saw one, so when Hollywood beckoned after the comedy's international success, he relocated – ironically – to Nixon's America.

The time capsule that is Taking Off was his first and only attempt to translate his Euro-cinema modus to modern-day studio filmmaking. In hindsight it's hard to tell whether this child of a rocky marriage is poking fun at or propping up the neurotic New Yorker crowd that populates this, to quote David Thompson, "mild version of [a] Feiffer cartoon." Yet viewed now, the deadpan-ugly take on square parents trying to tune in, turn on, and drop out makes it one of his most interesting films, with a push-pull tension that complements the debutante party-trashing of his rock musical adaptation, Hair, that would end the decade. What's remarkable about Forman is that, even after his acceptance as a bona fide player and a smoothing out of his technique, you can still see glimmers of the angry young man throughout his work. Tracing a line from Black Peter to Tony Clifton doesn't necessitate a lot of curves ... if anything, 40-plus years later, the whish of a flipped bird to society's confining norms seems to be a subtextual soundtrack to a still-growing body of work.

David Fear

'The Firemen's Ball' screens Sun/18, 1:30 p.m., Castro; 'Hair' screens April 23, 7:30 p.m., Castro; 'Taking Off' screens Sun/18, 3:30 p.m., Castro. For theater information see box, page 54.