Recovered Classic: Buttoners


Czech cinema. Let’s face it, the two words rarely appear in the same sentence. These days, it might well be impossible to walk around Prague without bumping into a film crew, but generally, it’s not the locals who doing the movie-making.

Back in 1999, however, before Hollywood turned the city into a giant movie set, Czech director Petr Zelenka released his second movie, and what a joy it turned out to be. Simply called Buttoners (Knoflikari in the local lingo), it’s a fiendishly clever black comedy which, upon its release, was a major success on the festival circuit.

Displaying an almost Altmanesque flair for narrative dexterity, Zelenka stitches together a portmanteau of six wildly imaginative short stories which overlap with crazy coincidence and share the common themes of chance and destiny.

Opening on board the Enola Gay just before the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, the film skips ahead exactly 50 years to modern-day Prague, where a series of bizarre, sometimes surreal, events unfold during the same day. These range from two lovers getting passionate in the back of a cab and a man who spits at trains, to a psychiatrist who causes a car crash and a weirdo with a perverse fetish for buttons.

It may sound completely bonkers, but this kaleidoscope of eccentric characters rarely ceases to delight and amuse, Zelenka bringing all the wonderfully quirky strands together in the final story, which meshes the various plot threads and time zones into a deeply satisfying whole.
A kindly cab driver provides the bridge between a number of the stories, prompting comparisons with Jim Jarmusch’s equally enjoyable Night On Earth, but Zelenka’s film goes further in that it takes a bolder approach to its script construction and suggests a sharper grasp of ambition and weird invention.

Chance and destiny, however, are not the only themes to keep resurfacing in this splendidly surreal movie. Jealousy, guilt, obsession and lunacy also put in regular appearances as the script riffs off Zelenka’s droll screenplay, the humour itself often skirting the line between tragedy and slapstick.

The six interweaving stories do have a tendency to veer off in unexpected directions and an inevitable unevenness creeps in, but that’s to be expected, because some stories are simply more exhilarating and stimulating than others.

Buttoners, however, is exactly the sort of bold, imaginative, rewarding-if-you-stick-with-it minor treasure which so often sinks without trace, and in this case, that really would be a waste.

David Lichtneker

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