The Ear, initially denied distribution, became the Czechoslovakian entry at Cannes twenty years later. The film is a chamber piece for two paranoid people-“a bugged version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf” (Sight and Sound). Returning home from an official reception where he has learned that his superiors have been arrested, Ludvik (Radoslav Brzobohaty), a high-level government functionary, and his wife Anna (Jirina Bohdalová) find their door open, their electricity cut off. The “ear” must be hidden somewhere. The agony and tension of preparing for Ludvik's imminent arrest precipitates a night of emotional searching, quarreling, bonding. Critic Oldrich Cerny notes that this nightmarish suspense film acknowledges the excruciating effect on private lives of omnipresent power, “symbolized in the Communist slogan, ‘Trust, but check!'”