If Birds, Orphans and Fools demonstrated Jakubisko's links with the Czech and French new waves, then Sitting Pretty on a Branch, a remake of that film (begun when the earlier film was still banned), is in a language that is pure Jakubisko. More contextualized in time and place (its black humor more political for that), at the same time, its characters lack the Hamlet-like quality of the earlier orphans. And so they are survivors. What Jakubisko seems to have learned in the intervening years is that nothing matters, and perhaps everything is a little wonderful for that. The action takes place in that moment of silence when "an angel passes," which it does, literally, in this film. Amid the confusion of refugees straggling home from the war's chaos, Pepe, a concentration camp survivor and one-time circus hand, and Prengal, a returning soldier, discover a booty of gold in a stolen bike. With a red-haired beauty who arrives out of nowhere, mute from the war's pain, they make a haven in the overgrown home of Jews killed in the camps, and on that heritage build a life of difference as Stalinism mounts its campaign for conformity. Jakubisko's roving camera makes us feel his presence-sitting in a tree.