You will meet a tall, dark stranger, many an adolescent girl is told. Few gypsies will mention that it will be a black horse, a wild one that has been badly mistreated, like the one Jorga Kotrbová finds and tames through kindness.

there's nothing obviously subversive about Karel Kachyna's film, released six years before Prague Spring. In fact, it could be construed as an attack on the hardhearted peasants who don't understand the loving principles of socialism, allied with the dull, workaday lack of understanding that socialism proceeds from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. I don't read its subtext that way. The effects of socialism were made for the Czechs' tendency for satire, and there are few pleasures like telling a joke that flies over the head of the censors. the people in charge of the community don't understand what Miss Kotrbová is going through. It's irrelevant to them.

Still, the thing about good art is that it is open to many interpretations. I like mine.