Moviola > Films > Dark Blue World

Dark Blue World  (12A)   112 mins

Director Jan Sverák's Dark Blue World embraces sentimentality with such brio it is hard to resist. The film recounts the little-known story of Czech fighter pilots who escaped the Nazi occupation of their country, came to England and fought in the RAF. When they returned home at the end of the war, the survivors were interned in work camps by a  paranoid Communist regime convinced that they had become corrupted by their contact with the West.  Sverák's film follows Franta (Ondrej Vetchy), a worldly captain in the defunct Czech Air Force, and Karel (Krystof Hádek), his earnest young recruit, as they leave home to fight the enemy on foreign soil. Having joined the RAF along with a number of fellow Czechs, Franta and Karel learn English (from a hilarious Anna Massey), sing mournful Czech songs (the main musical theme of the film, "Dark Blue World", was written by the Czech composer Jaroslav Jezek when he went blind), perform heroic feats in the air and manage to fall in love with the same woman (Tara Fitzgerald), who is looking after a houseful of evacuees while her husband is missing in action.

"Dark Blue World has an emotion that carries it past predictability into genuine anguish and anger for those wronged pilots, and the ways their lives were wiped out and their heroism forgotten. It's a fitting requiem for heroes forgotten."  Chicago Tribune
 

Last modified: 20-Jun-2008

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