Closely Watched Trains

“All it takes to make a man of a boy is a woman.”

A sleepy railway station in German-occupied Czechoslovakia is where Milos Hrma (Václav Neckář) starts work as a trainee dispatcher, while the war and the resistance pass him by. His mind is on one thing, his own virginity, and he wants rid of it. Jiří Menzel, adapting Bohumil Hrabal's novella, sets Milos beside the conducteress Masa (Jitka Scoffin), whose easy warmth is the only thing at the depot he cannot read.