Pearls of the Deep

An avant-garde Czech New Wave anthology that weaves together darkly comic vignettes about ordinary people's absurdities, pretensions, and disconnections with a playful, formally inventive touch.

A quintet of vignettes based on short stories by Bohumil Hrabal: an eventful trip to the motorcycle races results in drunkenness, long-winded discussions, and death; two elderly men create false biographies; insurance agents visit an eccentric painter/goat farmer and his mother; guests at a wedding reception remain oblivious to outlying misery; and a working-class boy romances a Roma girl.