Based on Ester Krumbachova's script and designs, the film contains three absurd love stories about the daydreaming of shy and hopeless lovers. They were conceived as songs, in the form of a rondo. The first, "The Temptation of an Operator," was intended as a silent melancholy comedy; the second, "Nastenska's Dream," portrays a waitress' desire for the glamor of aristocratic nobility embodied in her romantic longing for an officer and a famous singer. "The Adventure of Rudolf the Orphan" is the story of a misunderstanding, an astonishing night in an eccentric family which can never be rediscovered. Martyrs of Love abandoned the deadly seriousness of Nemec's previous films but in the choice of characters, their costumes, the ambiance of narrow cobblestoned streets, the ensemble of some shabby old objects, it evokes a vanished Prague which is still very close to Kafka's universe. Dreams, as we know, are as revealing of substantial truth as concrete reality. In the dreams of the protagonists there is a sort of récherche du temps perdu with all its grotesque comic-sad flavor. The film is constructed like a musical composition in which the succession of the movements completes, negates and corrects each part to create a subtle, hilarious but still tender whole. A broken-winged Eros flies in that Prague of the good old days. And Nemec presents it with irony and love. -Yvette Biro