The Czech answer to Germany's life-is-suffering “realist” films, Such Is Life merges those films' societal concerns with a decidedly more humanist, less determinist look at daily life in Prague. Subtitled “A Novel About a Prague Washerwoman,” the film is remarkable for its near-documentary montages of the rhythms and routines of ordinary life, its camera just as entranced with scenes of picnics, coal-workers, card games, beer-swilling, cemeteries in the rain, or the Charles Bridge as it is with the central narrative, which involves the exhausting routines of a washerwoman (Vera Baranovskaya, from Pudovkin's Mother), her perpetually drunk husband, and her manicurist daughter. A mesmerizing conduit for the filmmaking styles of the time-the rapid-fire montage aesthetic of Vertov, the lyrical concerns of Borzage-Such Is Life also points to the future of cinema, its desire to document everyday life prefiguring neorealism, and its “such is life” humanism predating the Czech New Wave.