I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglickeho krale)
Ignorance is liberating for Czech everyman in 'I Served.'
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 sneakiest part of "I Served the King of England" is that the dweeb at its 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.
The movie curls at the edges with magical realism, and it's erotic in ways that are liberating and probably more leering than intended. Jan loves women and so does "I Served the King of England," no 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. The movie flips the old cliche on its head: Love is blinding, and ruinously so.
"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 - the ironies keep piling up - 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.
Cheeky and episodic, 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; the movie considers that by doing nothing, Jan served Western interests, too. He certainly didn't serve Czechoslovakia, even if the movie implies he embodies less wonderful aspects of its soul.
Menzel made the 1968 foreign language Oscar winner "Closely Watched Trains," and like that film, "I Served the King of England" is sweet on the surface and tough beneath. (Filmmakers learn sleight of hand when they come up during a dictatorship.) Sometimes mere whimsy or the love of a young actress's curves overtakes the narrative, but more often than not the movie is hilarious and troubling. That's the intent: getting us to laugh and then asking what's so funny.
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, or the Roberto Benigni of "Life Is Beautiful" with a devilish twist, doing what he did for love even when he should have known better. The moral translates darkly and it translates well.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/movienation.
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