Three short story omnibus. The main hero and connecting link is Lieutenant Boruvka, created by Lubomír Lipsky. He deals with the murder case between climbers, the death of the dancer in the music theater and the strange disappearance of the mathematics professor.
It is the 1930s. Physician Bartos devotedly attends poor patients in the city suburbs, at the same time researching the possibilities of regeneration of human tissues after transplantation. His former colleague Rosen, now working as an assistant at the private clinic of surgeon Kirchenbruch, considers the research a mere utopia. The disappointed Bartos, trying to verify his theories, therefore accepts the outrageous proposal of Marion, owner of a brothel - to surgically replace the face of her lover, the wanted thief Cutter, with the face of murdered Father Hopsasa. Bartos is well paid but his successful operation remains a secret.
The doomed love of a city girl caught in the vise of poverty is detailed in Vavra’s fluid, romantic work, one of the most elegant creations of the Czech Modernist era... The film lingers over its characters’ habitats and haunts, finding psychological truths in what each owns or desires, and countering every Hollywood-ready scene of gleaming restaurants and dazzling penthouses with realist moments of employment lines and crammed flats. Vavra’s classical camerawork and aura of romantic defeatism give Virginity a force comparable to the master of this genre, Hollywood’s Frank Borzage. (BAM/PFA)