Film

Having established himself as the brightest talent of the Czech New Wave, Milos Forman didn’t have a problem convincing Universal Pictures to buy his pitch about a suburban girl shacked up with East Village bohemians. The studio figured that Forman’s affectionate antiauthoritarianism would nab them Easy Rider box office. Instead, they got a satire about the generation gap (cowritten by playwright John Guare and Buñuel’s scenarist, Jean-Claude Carrière) that put the squares and the groovies in the crosshairs. It’s no wonder that Taking Off tanked; rake both sides of the cultural divide over the coals and you’re left with no audience whatsoever.

Seen today, however, Forman’s career pivot point between Prague’s film-school halls and the Oscars podium is still a prime example of the way a foreign director can apply an outsider’s perspective to something like Nixon’s Amerikkka and draw blood. Everybody gets their rightful jabs: sensitive singer-songwriters (“It’s Sunday / As it was / A week ago”), turned-on youngsters and paranoid parents. Though the movie’s portrayal of the establishment’s fragile détente with Freak Power isn’t trenchant enough, the way Forman utilizes his breezy New Wave aesthetic is a wonder to behold. A montage of young females auditioning is transformed into a teenybopper version of Robert Frank’s The Americans; given the way the fishbowl anthropology of Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball (1967) is transferred from Euro bureaucrats to pot-curious Silent Majority members with such grace, you’d think Taking Off were one of his Czech farces dubbed into English. By the time the director tackled the countercultural totem Hair (1979), the style that invigorated his early work had been consigned to the childish-things pile. You couldn’t ask for a better last gasp than this.