[In the following excerpt, Coleman praises A Blonde in Love, complimenting Forman's subtlety, proficiency, and simplistic directing style.]

Milos Forman's A Blonde in Love is a wonderful film concerning, among other things, young love, sexual and social timidity, parental incomprehension, and the problems of a Czech community where the ratio of women to men is 16 to one. It's so much of a piece in fact, so funny and painful and precise in its observation of a sector of the human condition, that it presents a very real problem: how to describe it adequately? It enlists itself in that—to me—central tradition of filmmaking which includes the works of Renoir, Satyajit Ray, Ozu, Truffaut, Olmi, the earlier De Sica and, most recently, James Ivory. Such men seem not only to have been born with a natural and happy instinct for expressing themselves in cinema but to bring to it a generosity of spirit, an intelligent openness and gaiety towards others, which gives them something authentic to express.

It may be time to declare my square predisposition towards most, if not all, their works now that irate Godard fans write in accusing me of hating movies. In certain highly-strung quarters M. Godard seems indeed to have become synonymous with ‘movies.’ As I tried to point out when I reviewed Alphaville not long ago, he does offer pretty occasions for those professional and amateur critics who've apparently spent more of their waking life in cinemas than out of them. His half-baked films, as Mr Winkler's ‘interpretation’ of Pierrot le Fou in last week's correspondence columns copiously demonstrated, don't merely lead themselves to exegesis: they come at you begging for it. This may be an exciting new art-form, of course, which produces more interesting stuff on a page than ever was there on the screen. But it reminds me disconcertingly of those records which supply an orchestral background, leaving holes during which you saw away on your own violin.

With Mr Forman's second film, as with his first, Peter and Pavla, all the work has been done beforehand. From the first shot to the last, he knows what he's about. Once again he turns an unclouded, affectionate eye on commonplace aspirations and bafflements and makes them absolutely fresh and important. His blonde in love (Hana Brejchova) works in a shoe-factory and lives in a hostel near Prague. Dreamily ripe for an encounter, she meets a young dance-band pianist (Vladimir Pucholt) during a hop organised to bring together the men of a local army unit and the romantically deprived factory girls. Later that night she goes to bed with him. He gives her his address in Prague. One evening, soon after, she turns up at his home with a suitcase, to be met by his bewildered parents. Grudgingly she gets a bed for the night. As the film ends, she's back at the hostel after lights-out, gently embroidering to an eager girlfriend on her disastrous trip to the big city.

Mr Forman's technique is as personal as handwriting, yet it never obtrudes. As before, he uses several non-professionals in his cast and certainly some of his effects must come from the way he lets them be themselves within a framework only he really knows about. (It is reported that the pontificating dad in Peter and Pavla thought of the film as some sort of tragedy.) Here there are notably the performances of the pianist's increasingly indignant mother (Milada Jezkova) and of a middle-aged trio of soldiers in confused quest of a pick-up at the dance. But to speak of these as performances in the conventional sense is clearly inappropriate. The camera settles patiently down on them, taking what it wants: watching the mother steadily work herself up into righteous fury, following every fumbling move of the soldiers as they send a bottle of wine to the wrong table and half-heartedly spur one another on. The two longest sequences—and the most unaffectedly funny—are those in the dance-hall and at the pianist's home. Lanky Pucholt, the obstreperous builder's mate in Peter and Pavla, gets back late to find his blonde in love unexpectedly sleeping on the sofa: mother bustles in and drags him into the family bed. The recriminations, accusations and distraught efforts to get comfortable that ensue manage to be both hilarious and likely. Outside, the poor blonde listens and weeps.

The film is full of small, disconcerting switches of emotional tempo, which is one of its secrets. One is constantly invited to readjust one's sights. It never allows one to patronise. The editing is brilliant. An early glimpse of a striped tie round a tree acquires pathetic resonance when it's revealed on the top of the girl's things in her suitcase later on. One rapid succession of little episodes is worth inclusion in any film course for the lessons it might teach in economy without loss of clarity: at the hostel the girls are given a solemn talk on keeping themselves decent; the charming Hana Brejchova is seen hitching a lift into the city; an overhead camera dwells on another dance-palace, where Pucholt is soon discovered with another girl; a sudden, cryptic look at a hobo trundling a dummy from a store-window proves to be what Pucholt's somnolent parents are watching on television in the parlour; the bell rings and the blonde has arrived. Throughout, Mr Forman establishes the external, workaday contexts of his people's lives with the minimum of fuss—a couple of glances at Hana at the factory-bench, a shot or two of Pucholt at the piano. He is an extraordinary director and confirms the expectations aroused by that week of Czech cinema at the NFT last year.