The Joke

A postcard note to his girlfriend, a line that reads as a joke to him and as treason to his fellow students, cost Ludvik Jahn (Josef Somr) his Party membership and his place at the university in the 1950s. Fifteen years later he sets out to repay one of his accusers by seducing the man's wife, Helena (Jana Dítětová). Jaromil Jireš, working near the end of the Czech New Wave, moves between the two decades and lets the past keep interrupting the present.