AllMovie

One of the best directors out of the former Czechoslovakia, feminist filmmaker Vera Chytilova, turns her hand to social satire in this funny series of jabs at the flaws in Czech society and bureaucracy. The focal point of the story is a prefabricated (modular) apartment complex that is slowly, too slowly, going up. Since housing is so hard to find in Prague, the tenants who have bought into the new complex are forced to move in before it is completed -- their leases are up on their former apartments. No matter that walls are missing, that the rain lands on their heads, and that life in general is turned upside-down -- that is the very setting to bring out the foibles and assumptions of this society in a microcosm.