Tainted Horseplay

Director: Věra Chytilová

1988 / 134min / DCP

Three thirtysomething friends united by their sybaritic appetites for booze, sexual shenanigans, and other assorted hijinks—František (David Vávra) a restaurateur; Milan (Milan Šteindler), a veterinarian; and Pepe (Tomáš Hanák), an auditor—lead a life of feckless, reckless promiscuity… until a HIV-positive diagnosis hits the group like a nailbomb, rending old allegiances asunder and lowering a paranoiac pall over the trio. A stinging rebuke to boomer narcissism and the overindulgence of eternally extended adolescence, phenomena evidently as epidemic in the soon-to-fall Soviet territories as in Manhattan, London, or the 16th arrondissement, cast with members of Prague’s Sklep theater group, who bring to the proceedings a snarky vivacity.

Distributor: Národní filmový archiv

Part of Věra Chytilová x 4