Cats. The Criterion Channel has curated a series this month around cats. I don’t mean to just do promotion for them whenever I pick a movie for this series from one of their recently available collections, but with this one I couldn’t resist. And Czech New Wave staple The Cassandra Cat was just the one to watch. If you ever wanted to see a version of House that was just the cute cat doing magic shit, this is the movie for you.
It’s set in a world that skirts the boundaries of real and fairy tale -in that it starts out pretty grounded but after a point becomes a fantasy. The community is one where children are given a very stringent education, that enforces dull binaries in life and realism in art; creativity and imagination are implicitly discouraged -one of the trademarks of the Czech New Wave being of course abject criticism of such regimental institutions. But The Cassandra Cat is not a fierce social satire -it’s closer to a family movie, as the wise old Falstaffian storyteller Oliva (Jan Werich) presents to a class essentially a parable about a cat with glasses that when they are removed reveals people’s true nature by casting them in various symbolic colours. Not long after, this actually comes true during a magic show put on by a travelling magician -a twin of Oliva; and as in the story the cat, Mourek, becomes the subject of ire among the townspeople who seek to find and kill it while the children endeavour to protect it.
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By its sense of spontaneous whimsical absurdity, it's clear The Cassandra Cat belongs to the same movement that produced Věra Chytilová's Daisies and Miloš Forman's The Fireman's Ball -bizarre satirical exercises that break as many rules of form as they can. This film, additionally known by many names including The Cat Who Wore Sunglasses or That Cat, comes from a lesser-known director in that line Vojtěch Jasný, who doesn't have as distinct a touch as those others yet still lets loose a great degree of wild visual inventiveness. There's a crispness to the photography even before anything sensational happens, as Oliva looks down on the town from a clock tower window declaring the story to be true and introducing a bunch of characters below a la Rear Window -all while the film's clarity and colour scheme give it the sheen of a wood painting.
But then comes the magic show -and I don't know if any movie has been so enamoured with using magic tricks as spectacle on film since the days of Georges Méliès. The way the Magician conjures a bunch of floating objects, or how the pieces of his suit start dancing before he joins it, are real delights to see. I wonder if some of it was done using animation, given the long Czech tradition of stop-motion filmmaking from figures like Jiří Trnka, Karel Zeman, and later Jan Švankmajer. Regardless, it fits in well with both the general tenor of a cultural context of unique and thrilling weirdness, and the transition to charming fantasy the movie undergoes at this juncture.
And yes, when the cat's glasses come off, we see the monochrome people in a charmed but chaotic ballet evocative of colourful beauties like The Red Shoes. The colour theory applied is kind of adorable: red for lovers, purple for the envious, yellow for the cowardly, blue for the sad. A sequence that follows sees two main characters, Robert the disillusioned teacher (Vlastimil Brodský) and Diana the actress (Emília Vášáryová), both coated in red, embark on a delightful romantic tryst over emphatic music that could be a live-action Fantasia sequence.
Oliva remains the most endearing figure though, as Werich plays him with the delight of a Czech Orson Welles -jolly and charismatic and exceptionally intuitive. Even he though might be second fiddle to little Mourek, the cat with shades. As if predicting the internet age's love of all things cat, Jasný hones in on the cat's ambivalent face, with or without the glasses on. He includes scenes of the cat chilling out, sitting like a king, being carried by children, and it is quite photogenic in all of these. The immediate love the children have for him feels right, the funniest and possibly most honest beat of the movie being when they collectively rebel and run away from their village elders until the captured Mourek is returned safe. A true kids and their cat triumphing over mean adults kind of story.
The Cassandra Cat ultimately reminds me of Three Wishes for Cinderella, also a whimsical fairy tale of a European film. This one certainly has a more sardonic edge of social commentary, but there is a similar innocence to it, coloured by a hell of a lot of formalist imagination. And of course not forgetting the coolest cat in town!
Criterion Recommendation: The Adventures of Milo and Otis (1986)
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I seriously considered nominating Cats here, but I don’t think Criterion is ready for that. Still, I wanted to adhere to the theme and here was a relatively beloved movie out of Japan about an orange tabby kitten and a little pug. And honestly I don’t remember a lot about The Adventures of Milo and Otis, beyond that I saw it as a kid and probably thought of it as inferior to Homeward Bound. But a couple scenes here and there still stick and it’s got an air of just abundant cuteness (the image of Milo hugging that flower is utterly adorable). The movie is somewhat infamous for allegations of animal abuse -unverified but fairly believable given some of the film’s circumstances. And it was cut down for an American release, and given a new narration by Dudley Moore. But it may still be worth a revisit. Animal movies from other cultures don’t often translate (The Cassandra Cat is an example) but this one did; and it would do for Criterion to showcase a little more wildlife in their collection of significant annals of cinema.
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