Summary
A Squandered Sunday speaks highly critically about both the military environment and Czechoslovak society in general. Its story is centered around one army officer, who is battling feelings of loneliness and suicidal impulses during one sunny Sunday. Czech new wave films were typically satirical comedies or allegories, which makes A Squandered Sunday exceptional and perhaps the darkest Czech modernist title. It evokes feelings of doom, emptiness and skepticism towards the possibility of moving the motionless space-time of one's own life. The film was finished in 1969, but was banned from distribution by political representatives due to its overall atmosphere. It was therefore shown in cinemas twenty years later after the fall of state socialism in Czechoslovakia. Drahomíra Vihanová, who debuted with this film as a director, was only allowed to make documentaries in the meantime and her career as a filmmaker never fully recovered from the two decades of forced break.