Milos Forman
Taking off

Usually, a director's name is associated with the titles of their most successful films and critical acclaim, relegating other works to the role of lesser achievements. This can lead to forgetting films that nonetheless have a certain value. Take, for example, a director like Milos Forman: people easily and rightly cite works like "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Amadeus." All well and good, but not giving due attention to a film like "Taking Off" is, in my opinion, a real shame, especially if revisiting it today highlights a certain freshness in describing the confusion that pervaded American society between the late '60s and early '70s.

The story, inspired by a true event, starts with a fifteen-year-old girl who, one day in New York, goes to a musical audition aimed at selecting new artistic talents. This happens without her parents' knowledge, who, not seeing her return at the usual time, fear she is lost, aware that many young people during that period were leaving their families to join hippy communities. With the help of a neighboring couple, the two parents start a frantic search for their daughter, during which they even attend a meeting of an association for parents of runaway children. During this event, they hear from an alternative psychologist who explains and demonstrates how to roll and smoke a joint, intending to directly understand the kind of experiences the youth have. The effect is obviously hilarious to the point that, once back home, the parents find themselves in a completely uninhibited state, even playing a game of strip poker. One can imagine the shock experienced, in the face of such a scene, by the daughter herself who has meanwhile returned home. During her absence, she met a hippy musician who composes protest songs against the system, gaining a certain success. When it is said that the choices of one's now more mature children can leave parents disoriented...

Presented and awarded at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, "Taking Off" was the first American film by the Czechoslovak director Forman, who had moved abroad following the Soviet repression of the so-called Prague Spring in 1968. The stylistic touch of the author appears almost intact. With a light and ironic tone, Forman confirms himself as a keen observer of social mechanisms. Just as a certain dreary social conformism prevailed in Eastern European societies, subjugated by a grey bureaucracy, so does the average American bourgeois not shine for sagacity in the face of the youthful restlessness of that era. Well-positioned in an opulent consumerist society, that bourgeois acts awkwardly and ineffectively in trying to tune into the unfulfilled needs of their children, who, instead, have fully understood the limits of the American way of life and are struggling to find alternative paths.

This Forman film is thus a vivid portrait of society in a specific historical period for America and the Western world as a whole. Worth recovering, therefore, also considering the fact that the author skillfully sketches a disorienting situation in the relationship between parents and daughters/sons. Namely, the moment when, being too accustomed to seeing and treating them in a certain way, parents become aware of the rapid inner evolution of their children, finding themselves totally caught off guard by the new state of affairs. It is life in its natural and relentless temporal evolution, and "Taking Off," a small great film, brilliantly highlights this eternal theme.