Reviewed by Lindsay Mackie
Stars Ivan Barnev, Odlrich Kaiser, Julia Jentsch,
Martin Huba, Marian Labuda, Milan Lasica,
Josef Abrhám, Jirí Lábus, Jaromír Dulava
Written by Jiri Menzel
Certification UK 15 | US R
Runtime 120 minutes
Directed by Jiri Menzel
This film of Bohumil Hrabal’s great novel, I Served the King of England, has many of the ingredients and much of the structure of Closely Observed Trains, the classic Czech film of 1968 which won an Oscar and which came to personify the Prague Spring. Jiri Menzel, then a young director, really came to international recognition through Closely Observed Trains, where he worked closely with author Hrabal and now, a decade or so after Hrabal’s death, he has made this film in part as a homage to the great writer.
Jan Dite is a provincial waiter in the Czechoslovakia of the 1930s. He wants to be a millionaire and the film charts his progress — cheerful, cheeky, almost amoral, unmoved by the coming of the Nazis, through that old world of middle Europe and tis bourgeouis hotels and pubs, and elegant restaurants. The device has a long Czech tradition — from Good Soldier Schweik through Kafka — of the onlooker, ignoring or hopelessly misreading reality. There's an element of surreal disconnectedness — the escapades, the sex (a lot of it, maybe more than in the original novel?) the coincidences take place at the same time as the Nazi invasion and the communist takeover.
The older Dite reflects on all this, as the film enters the duller greyer years of the early 1960s, when we know, though he doesn’t, that another cataclysm is in the offing. There’s a sumptuousness to this film that might gently indicate the the Czechs themselves were fecklessly untroubled by the looming clouds of militarism and anti Semitism. Hbrabal used the same kind of parable in Closely Observed Trains. Does this film have that kind of resonance and direct line to a national consciousness? The answer is clearly no, but its elegant and spirited, and makes its classic European journey one you want to go on.