Cutting It Short

Cutting It Short (Postřižiny, 1981) is a Czech comedy you can watch online on iFILM. Director Jiří Menzel — whose Closely Watched Trains took the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film — returned to Bohumil Hrabal's prose for this portrait of a small-town brewery and the people orbiting it.

Francin manages the brewery with quiet discipline and a permanent dread of the audit board. His wife Maryška does everything he can't: she laughs freely, feeds strangers, and wears her extravagant blonde hair like a declaration. Then Pepin arrives — Francin's unstoppably talkative brother — and whatever routine remained is gone.

Magda Vášáryová makes Maryška worth watching even when nothing is happening, which is most of the film. That's the Hrabal formula: small events, large personalities, a nostalgia for a Bohemian provincial life that already felt half-imaginary when he was writing it. Stream Cutting It Short online on iFILM.