Jára Cimrman Lying, Sleeping


Jára Cimrman Lying, Sleeping is a 1983 Czechoslovak comedy film directed by Ladislav Smoljak. It is a biopic of the fictional Czech national hero Jára Cimrman, who is portrayed by one of his inventors, Zdeněk Svěrák.
The story is framed by an excursion to Liptákov, the village where Cimrman allegedly spent the final years of his life. The retrospective passages, which make up the most of the film, span Cimrman's whole "known" life, where he interacts with many personalities of Czech and European science and culture in the Belle Époque. A large portion of the film deals with Cimrman's acting as a tutor in the family of Franz Ferdinand d'Este, the heir presumptive of Austria-Hungary. In this role Cimrman is secretly aiming to "split the monarchy".

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