Juraj Jakubisko's long-suppressed tale of love, death and insanity focuses on the unconventional relationship between two men and a Jewish orphan girl (Marketa Lazarova's eponymous Magda Vasaryova) as they travail a war-torn landscape of bombed-out churches and wrecked homes. Evoking the cinema of Truffaut, Godard and Buhuel, Jakubisko's exhilarating and free-wheeling film is by turns playful, surreal and, finally, increasingly nightmarish. Studded with cultural and historical references it was regarded by the then-authorities as 'decadent and harmful art' and banned until the very end of the Communist regime in 1989. Now, forty-five years on, it remains, politically and formally, one of the most radical films of the Czechoslovak New Wave.
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