Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále

I got a bit of a shock when I saw this film. It doesn't seem to follow the rules of contemporary film-making--in other words, women aren't shown as fully equal to men (although they can be very resourceful in dealing with petty tyranny) and the hero shows no sign of resentment for the way he is treated. I felt a lot closer to the great works of the heyday of classic film by Cukor, Ophuls and Lubitsch. The story unfolds calmly and logically, whether the events take place in the 30's, 40's or 50's of the last century. Ivan Barnev as the young Jan is superb: funny, roguish and balletic (just watch how gracefully he swoops around the restaurant with that heavy tray; wonder how much rehearsal time that needed.) Jiri Menzel made Closely Watched Trains, then saw his career go into eclipse after the Soviet invasion in 1968. The work he has done since hasn't come to my attention until now. This may be his swan-song, since he is 70 now, but I hope not.

Menzel, faithful to Hrabal, shows the Fall of Czech Man - and Sudeten German Woman - and their expulsion from their respective Middle-European idylls: They tragically fall into each other's arms just as global issue is joined that soon disillusions our Romeo and destroys his (now unfortunately rampantly Nazi) Juliet.

Neither the quiet life of getting rich and enjoying all the pleasures money can bring, nor the stirring Wagnerian strains of Germanic supremacist idealism, can survive, but our opportunistic anti-hero, Ditie (a name which can translate as 'little man') is more adaptable, because his ideals are more pliant to the accidents of fate than his German wife's rigid Hitlerite fanaticism, and consequently he is eventually able to emerge from a sort of Communist Purgatory with a keen appreciation of life's real and much simpler necessities.

With profound irony, it is in a smashed and ethnically cleansed Sudeten German village that an older and a wiser Ditie's rehabilitation is completed. And it is from this sobering perspective that he can finally both regret the excesses and errors of his life, and yet also take nostalgic pleasure from what was, after all, the wonderful, glittering, profoundly human spectacle of folly and grandeur which his life has been! Far from tragic or depressing, therefore, this film of the 20th century debacle of a nation ruined remarkably concludes with a very Czech endorsement of the simple, inoffensive pleasure in life which will always console this patient people at the troubled heart of darkest Europe: Ditie allows himself to enjoy a tankard of Pilsener beer - and Menzel's camera seems to gild the moment with as much gloriously sensuous golden dreaminess and spiritual fulfillment as ever bloated millionaire or romantically excessive idealist knew.

At last, the little man has found his fulfillment where it always lay: in the little things. At last, old, disillusioned and unseduced any longer by the world's headier attractions, Ditie finds himself at home and happy.

Here, the film seems to be saying, is the real idyll to which the Czech person should retire for refreshment of the soul, and not those false - though fabulous - ones we have been forced to discard.

Just as Ditie observes that his own career of accidents always turned out well, so in this perspective the Czech experience seems, on the whole, to have turned out for the best. This optimistic fatalism seems typical of the Czech way of seeing things, and is as characteristic of this film of Menzel's old age as it was of his early masterpiece, 'Closely observed trains.' On this view, it would be churlish to condemn the film for self-indulgence, as many Western critics have done. Frankly, they haven't suffered so much, so what do they know of ethical conundrums and the moral paradoxes of survival? This meditation on the more inglorious struggles of the insignificant and friendless to survive deserves our respect, not an easy and priggish contempt. This must especially be true in the country which lies behind the heavily loaded title 'I served the King of England,' for this heavy hint must surely prick that particular national conscience with its role in one of history's most blatant acts of betrayal. The title practically dares any English commentator to judge Ditie in his historical predicament!

(There is also considerable satisfaction to be had by the viewer from the sheer technical finesse of the film's production, on every level. Jiri Menzel's craft is also hugely impressive in scene after scene, which are turned with complete mastery of tragi-comic effect. But this is a study for another occasion.)

Like the butler played by Anthony Hopkins in the 1994 film "The Remains of the Day", the waiter at the centre of "I Served the King of England" (Jiri Menzel, Czech Republic, 2006) is not interested in politics. Major historical events surround him, yet these completely escape his attention. His ambition is simply to become a millionaire, like the fat cats he serves at table. In 1930s Prague, Hitler, in Berlin, is making a radio announcement about his aim to "liberate" the Sudetenland. Bored, Jan Dite, the waiter, simply turns the dial to a dance music station.

He manages to float through the Nazi invasion, first of the Sudetenland, then of Czechoslovakia. By a combination of hook and crook, he achieves his ambition of owning his own hotel through the sale of valuable stamps, stolen from a vanished Jewish family. This does not give him a moment's pause but later, when he sees a trainload of Jews in cattle-cars moving off to Auschwitz, he has a rush of compassion and chases after the train in an attempt to hand the deportees a sandwich. After the war, as a self-confessed millionaire, he is sent to prison when his hotel is nationalised. He emerges fifteen years later, older, but not much wiser. He is Schweik, but without the latter's sly intelligence.

This sketchy summary cannot do justice to a film which has been described as a near-flawless masterpiece, in which "Prague has never looked better". It is permeated with the ironic wit which marked Menzel's earlier films, such as the Academy Award winning Closely Watched Trains (1966). Dite befriends the German girl Liza, described by one reviewer as "the sweetest little Nazi in the history of the cinema". They are in bed, making love in the missionary position. Liza keeps pushing his head aside so that she can gaze at the big picture of Adolf Hitler on the opposite wall. Such was love in the Third Reich. The scene in which Dite is undergoing a racial fitness test which involves giving a sperm sample is intercut with young Czech men being unloaded from a lorry at an execution ground. Of this, Dite is blissfully unaware.

The Remains of the Day was based on a serious and perceptive novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. The genesis of I Served the King of England, by contrast, was a comic novel by Bohumil Hrabal, a book I cannot wait to get my hands on. Any offers?

Maybe, like me, you don't know that much about the history of the country wherein sits Prague, and its remnants of regal splendour. After watching I Served the King of England, you will know more. A lot more. The politics. The humour. The cultures. The aspirations. The troubled relations with neighbouring empires. And the incredible resilience of its individuals.

I Served the King of England is very ambitious. It condenses an epic novel into two hours and squeezes in more styles than a catwalk. There are nods to the wit of Charlie Chaplin. The visual eulogies of Peter Greenaway. Penitentiaries, bars, brothels, woods, invading armies. All are collected in a dizzying montage as Jan Díte reviews the highs and lows of his life and loves in flashback.

He has just been released from Prague Correctional Facility, having served almost 15 years. He is also in rather humble circumstances. This seems to contrast with his lifelong and apparently successful ambition to become a millionaire. The first half of the film has a theatrical feel of unreality – much like a musical. Serving lad Díte manages to score with a local beauty at the nearby bordello. He then get various jobs that involve him working with sophisticated women of pleasure, or in top hotels, or sometimes both together. His short stature enables him to play many tricks, like surreptitiously throwing a handful of coins on the ground for the pleasure of watching rich men get down on their hands and knees with their bums in the air. One of his favourite penchants with the ladies, on the other hand, is to ornament their naked and prostrate forms with anything from flowers, to fruit, to funds from his growing pocket book. One particularly striking moment is when he decorates a naked brothel girl (who looks worryingly like Kylie Minogue) in large margarita daisies. The scene is as arresting as the nude-and-rose-petals shot in American Beauty, or the female-served-for-dinner in The Cook The Thief His Wife & Her Lover.

Menzel's taste for a decadent protagonist is in no way sullied by shame. His whores are creatures of beauty: "The scent of raspberry trailed behind her. She stepped out in that silk dress, full of peonies, and bees hovered around her like a Turkish honey store." ('Bees' you will note, not 'flies'.) The description follows an incident where the lady in question pours raspberry grenadine over herself - to stop Díte from getting into trouble.

I Served the King of England soon becomes rife with political and social comment, even before we get to the eponymous and very loaded comment by Díte's boss boasting his resumé. Having treated us to sumptuous society, the film reminds us of the cost: "I discovered that those who said 'work is ennobling' were the same men who drank all night and ate with lovely young ladies seated on their knees." The palatial buildings, over-refined manners and ostentatious egregiousness of old Europe belie the fabled shangrila on which they are modelled. As we witness the Nazi and then Communist take-overs, the film touches on many issues that have affected the creation and difficult continuation of the country now known as the Czech Republic. Amusingly, the Nazi ideal of 'racial purity' enables Díte to continue his lifestyle - his German fiancé secures him a job at a breeding ground for top military studs.

The best parts of the film are full of beauty and sadness. An old man reminisces: "We, in the 20th century, are inclined to see the glory in ourselves and the shame in others – that's how the mess got started." The latter half of the film gradually becomes more serious in tone, even didactic. Here is your history lesson, insight into human nature, poetry and great literary adaptation all in one, it seems to be saying to us.

I Served the King of England is a film on an enormous scale. It makes a valiant attempt to be a masterpiece, but feels as if it didn't have quite enough time to display its flaunted genius. One cannot help but admire it. Even if it doesn't quite reach the dizzying heights to which it aspires.

The works of Czech director Jiri Menzel constitute a tasty cocktail of humanism and laughter. In this film, the cocktail is personified in the words spoken by the narrator and lead character early in the film: "It was always my luck to run into bad luck." Menzel's innocent male country bumpkins have simplistic goals in life—-get rich and charm the beautiful woman in their horizon. His films remind you of the social satire embedded in the works of Charles Chaplin and the visual gags in the cinema of Buster Keaton. Only Menzel's body of work has a dose of moral ambiguity.

While Menzel's cinema is often mistaken as being solely his own genius, he actually rides on the shoulders of three major literary giants of the former Czechoslovakia—Bohumil Hrabal, Vladislaw Vancura, and Zedenek Sverak. Menzel's cinema provides a convenient "easy read." of the fine literary tradition to which Milan Kundera belongs by bringing alive on screen slivers of statements and observations recorded by these novelists. Menzel's true gift is making the written word look attractive on screen with the use of imaginative visual gags. The spoken words (the writer's contribution) and carefully chosen actors serve as the pivot to enjoy the visual feast in Menzel's cinema. His mastery of visual comedy has made a major difference to Czech cinema being associated with comedy rather than drama, quite unlike other East European cinema where tragedies and serious drama overshadowed the comedy genre.

This film happens to be the sixth work of Hrabal that Menzel has adapted on screen—-the first being "Closely watched trains."

Politicians find satire uncomfortable. It is not surprising that Hrabal's novel "I served the King of England" was banned for years. When ultimately Menzel made it into a movie in 2006 using Hrabal's script, it won the FIPRESCI prize at Berlin. Menzel's cinema (and Hrabal's novels) has considerable political and social criticism. The film opens with clemency/pardon given to a prisoner who has almost completed his jail term. Communist political bigwigs wish to ape the capitalists, without a clue of what is required to gain social respect. Hrabal's script is clearly critical of the communist regime: "People who said social work was ennobling were the same men who drank all night and ate with lovely young women seated on their knees.' Butlers act superior to their new masters who do not know social etiquette. The new Czech communist politicos bend over backwards to please any one with the remotest Russian credentials. It is no small wonder that Hrabal got into trouble with the authorities until the political regime changed in recent years.

Apart from political criticism, social criticism of Czechs get liberally dished out in the film. When the physically short-statured waiter Jan Dite (literally translated as Johnny Child) throws coins on the floor for fun, rich and poor Czechs crawl without social distinction on the floor to pick up the money, allowing the short-statured waiter to look down at those he was serving and emerge physically and socially "tall" for a brief period. There is another line that Hrabal/Menzel uses to describe Czechs and their actions over the decades "Czechs do not fight wars—therefore we were not invaded, we were annexed." These are lines that will make many laugh, but these lines could make the author/ the director unpopular with a few who cannot take self criticism.

The quest for money and riches underpin this film in particular and much of Menzel's cinema. The film has the lead character selling sausages at a railway station. So engrossed is he in counting the change he has to return to a customer who has given him a big bank note, that the train pulls out with the angry customer fuming that he has been cheated. But Hrabal and Menzel had together done a similar scene in "Closely watched trains" where a train pulls out as the young hero is about to kiss his love with eyes closed, taking away his beloved girl whose eyes are open and is agitated that the kiss was missed.

Money is a recurring theme in "I served the King of England." The hero dreams of being a millionaire. One colorful character keeps himself amused spreading out cash on the floor like a carpet. Money is what waiter's get if he is good and smart, enough to buy up the hotel. He gets a medal from an Ethiopian Head of State, modeled on the physical attributes of Haile Selassie; merely because he can bend down to receive it. He gets a fat tip because he is physically near to a rich guest doling out his largesse.

After one has laughed sufficiently, one could reflect on the less obvious but darker side of Hrabal/Menzel's contribution to cinema. The women are lovely to look at. They bear a striking common factor—they are to be won. They are to be used, often as useful commodities. One Nazi girl even makes love, thinking of Hitler during the act. You do not see Hrabal and Menzel developing the women characters as they do their male ones. In this film, the anti-hero is dismissed from his job because he is not a good Czech.

"I served the King of England" are the spoken credentials of a respected waiter in the film as he trains the lead character of the film. Yet, the film is about a successful Czech who became a millionaire as he had dreamt, who married a Nazi and had enjoyed life when other Czechs were being led to the gas chambers, and was imprisoned when the Communists came to power. Hrabal and Menzel may have given us great comedy over six films. Evaluate the content closely and there is more to their work than pure comedy.