WARM GREETINGS FROM EARTH. A chaotic and funny science fiction comedy

“Good morning, may we ask you one question? How would you react to a visit from an extraterrestrial civilization?” – inquire the aliens in Warm Greetings from Earth (Srdecný pozdrav ze zemekoule). 

Alien A and Alien B arrive on Earth to study the local civilization. The visitors take on human form and contact Dr. Jánský, chosen as an average representative of humanity (the scientist also works at the Institute for Communication with Extraterrestrial Civilizations). The visitors’ presence further disrupts Jánský’s already fragile peace of mind, as the aliens, like unruly children, cause chaos wherever they go: they cause a gas explosion in the doctor’s apartment, wreck a store, dismantle a neighbor’s car, disrupt construction workers, harass passersby, and disturb a scientific symposium by posing as distinguished scholars. A and B attempt manual labor and indulge in erotic pleasures with Earth women. When they want to return home, their superiors inform them that Earth is facing a catastrophe.

Warm Greetings from Earth is one of the last films by Oldřich Lipský, the Czech master of comedy and author of Man from the First Century (1962), Gentlemen, I Killed Einstein (1970), and The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians (1981). Lipský wrote the screenplay with Slovak comedians Milan Lasica and Július Satinský, who played the roles of Aliens A and B. The idea for the story of the alien visit to Earth came from Vladimír Jiránek, a set designer, cartoonist, and animator best known as the co-creator of the popular series Neighbors about the inept handymen Pat and Mat. For Greetings, Jiránek also created animated drawings that served as reports submitted by the aliens to their superiors. These animations were accompanied by comments such as “Humanity’s greatest achievements are: the lighter, soft-boiled eggs, pop music, and public transportation.”

One cannot miss the subtle satire in Greetings on both human foibles and Czechoslovak socialism. The humor arises from the collision of the aliens’ childlike naivety with the civilizational and systemic absurdities of everyday life in the 1980s – and anyone who lived through those times or is familiar with recent history needs no convincing about the absurdity of existence in the Eastern Bloc. As Stanisław Tym aptly wrote in his play Dear Mr. Ionesco: “You ask, Mr. Ionesco, what is the People’s Republic of Poland? I walk into a store, I say to the saleswoman: ‘I’d like a comb, please.’ And she says nothing, remains silent. I say it again: ‘I’d like a comb, please.’ Still nothing. The third time – the same. Would you, Mr. Ionesco, have imagined hiring a deaf saleswoman in a store? Perhaps you might, but she wasn’t deaf at all, and that you wouldn’t have imagined, Mr. Ionesco.”

Life in the Eastern Bloc was a goldmine for satirists, as evidenced by the work of Stanisław Bareja. However, it seems that the creators of Greetings did not fully exploit this potential. The biggest problem with the film is its loose, improvised form: the plot is thin and quickly disintegrates into a series of more or less successful sketches of almost cabaret origin (no surprise, considering Lasica and Satinský’s artistic background). The impression of incoherence is heightened by the variety of humor types (situational, political, slapstick, etc.) that generally do not harmonize. This is particularly evident in the second half of the film, where the creators – likely running out of ideas for developing the story – begin to flounder. But perhaps this was the very nature of life in the socialist bloc: arbitrary, chaotic, and amusing only up to a point.