Can a nebbish see history? Does a human zero such as the hero of “I Served the King of England” understand when he’s living in epochal times and rise to meet its expectations? Or does he just muddle through, making good choices, bad choices, and really bad choices?
The film, an epic/tragic farce from the legendary director Jiri Menzel based on a 1971 novel by Bohumil Hrabal, follows the trajectory of one slightly below-average Czech citizen across the worst the 20th century has to offer.
By the end it finds him both indomitable and guilty as sin. “I Served” is a charming, damning portrait that has been stinging audiences in the Czech Republic since its 2006 release. In any language, what the movie says about surviving fascism by rolling with it speaks loud and clear.
The dweeb at the center, Jan Díte, is a clown. As played in his youth by Ivan Barnev — a wispy blond innocent blessed with slapstick grace — Jan has a sense of humor to offset his minimal height, and he always seems to be in the right place at the right time.
Working his way up through the ranks of waiters in various prewar Prague establishments, Jan’s the low-level nothing who gets singled out for praise from visiting dignitaries or for romantic attention from glamorous shady ladies far above his station. Don’t ask how he gets a medal from the emperor of Ethiopia, or ends up covering a hooker with flowers. Better yet, don’t ask what he did in 1939, when the Nazis marched in.
Jan loves women and so does “I Served the King of England,” never more so than at the Hotel Tichota, a rapturous, upscale, prewar brothel at which the hero works and frolics for a while. Eventually Jan falls for Líza (Julia Jentsch), a happy-go-lucky Czech German and committed Nazi who wants a little tribe of Hitler Youth to call her own. No matter that she can’t take her eyes off the Führer’s portrait when she and Jan make love; she’s his girl and that’s that.
“I Served the King of England” is told through the memories of an older Jan (played by Oldrich Kaiser), recently released after 15 years in a prison camp run by the Soviet puppets of the post-WWII Czech state.
Grizzled and ruminant, he moves into a village settled by Germans during the war and now abandoned, and turns over the pieces of his past in his mind. Was his simple youthful ambition to own a hotel and be a millionaire such a bad thing? It depends on who’s asking the question and who’s running the government.
The film is full of rich subsidiary characters like Walden (Marián Labuda), an aging Jewish businessman whose path keeps crossing Jan’s, and Skrivánek (Martin Huba), a magisterial head waiter who briefly becomes the little man’s mentor and ultimately the movie’s conscience. It’s he who brags he once served the king of England.
In Hrabal’s and Menzel’s calculus, Díte (the name translates as “baby”) is the allegorical Czech — everyone who let events wash over without doing anything.
Barnev plays him as Chaplin’s little man, reborn as a fascist enabler doing what he did for love even when he should have known better. The moral translates darkly — and well.
“I Served the King of England”
R for sexuality and nudity. 2 hours. In Czech and German with English subtitles. Written and directed by Jiri Menzel from a novel by Bohumil Hrabal; starring Ivan Barnev, Oldrich Kaiser, Julia Jentsch, Martin Huba. Opens today at Tamarac Square Theatre.
