Summary
After directing one of the stories in the film Hlídač dynamitu (The Dynamite Watcher, 1963), director Hynek Bočan made his feature film debut with Nikdo se nebude smát (Nobody Gets the Last Laugh), inspired by a tale from Milan Kundera’s short stories collection Směšné lásky (Laughable Loves). Art historian and assistant professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Karel Klíma gets himself into trouble when he loses a paper on the painter Mikoláš Aleš, written by an aspiring but hopeless scholar. The telling of a small lie results in the manic author of the worthless text getting on a war footing with Klíma, which wreaks havoc in the latter's professional and personal life... This sarcastic story of the minor transgressions of a scholar grown lazy offers a bizarre, merciless criticism of a society based on hypocrisy and envy. Bočan, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Pavel Juráček, cast Jan Kačer as the protagonist of his unusually mature debut.
Read more
