The best Jaromír Nosek’s movies

An army deserter and a soon-to-be high school graduate embark on an ill-fated romance in this musical film set in the '60s.

This romantic comedy presents a story of two women, twenty-year-old Laura, an editor at a woman’s weekly, and her widowed mother, a translator-interpreter named Jana. The two of them tirelessly seek Mr. Right. Having once lived through an intense relationship with a ‘typical’ Czech man, Jana intentionally avoids Czech men. She searches for her dream foreigner while long-sufferingly warding off the tragicomic advances of her good-natured neighbor Žemla. After several unsuccessful attempts, Laura falls in love with Oliver, a forty year old who works as an ad agency idea man. Little does she suspect that twenty years ago Oliver was Jana’s true love…

Lovers & Murderers is about the ongoing war between those who have and those who want to have what the others have. The have-nots see themselves as poor victims trying to get for themselves what is justly theirs. But when the have-nots become haves, they continue to see themselves as victims of the hordes baying for what is justly theirs, and they have neither the energy nor the security to enjoy what they have obtained. The movie takes place in the microcosm of a small apartment building. The principal goal of the young people who share rooms in the building is to move into their own room and, some day, a real apartment. They scheme to get what they're after: form short-lived alliances, petition, frighten, marry, become pregnant, anything that might work. Lovers & Murderers presents Páral's vision of mankind caught in a cyclical process in which ideology pales before the pettiness, cruelty, and self-justification of human nature.