A Carriage Going to Vienna

It’s the last days of the war and Krista is forced to take two Wehrmacht soldiers to the Austrian border in her wagon. One of them is seriously wounded, the other is a terrified rookie. The countrywoman hides an axe in the cart under the straw because she has something quite different in mind… The only backdrop to this deliberately paced drama, which unfolds in a single day, is a long forest road immersed in a silence only occasionally broken by the sounds of the accompanying organ music. The latter contrasts sharply with the raw images and brutal scenes and, by degrees, helps to create the illusion that the forest, with its columns of trees, is slowly transforming into a church – namely the place where we atone for our actions, where we are punished for them, and where we receive absolution. Or where we cast thoughts of bad deeds from our minds, like Krista with her intention to exact a bloody revenge on the soldiers for her husband’s death. During the mid-1960s the film offered a completely novel treatment of the war theme since it rejected the division of the opposing sides into evil Germans and good Czechs, instead portraying the widespread degradation of man in a decayed, violent era.