I Served the King of England

2006 - Dir.: Jiri Menzel.

Shown in FeckenOdeon 2 on October 14th, 2011

Many of us first got to know the Czech director Jiri Menzel through his whimsical 1966 Oscar-winner "Closely Observed Trains." Veteran critic Roger Ebert looked up his review of the earlier film and found a sentence that also could apply to this movie: "If you're charged up emotionally, you'd better lie down for an hour or two before going to see it. It requires an audience at peace with itself." Don't assume, however, that Menzel's "I Served the King of England" is a snoozer; for that matter, don't assume it has anything to do with the King of England. It's a film filled with wicked satire and sex both joyful and pitiful. But Menzel doesn't pound home his points. He skips gracefully through them, like his hero. He takes the velvet-glove approach. Here is a film with a hatred of Nazis and a crafty condemnation of communist bureaucracy and cronyism. It seems to be a comic tale of the long and somewhat uneventful life of Jan Dite, who worked as a waiter, bought a hotel with stolen postage stamps and was jailed because he wasn't quick enough to figure out what the communists, when they came to power, really wanted from him.

Director Jiri Menzel, like the film’s hero is a survivor. He began his career in the false dawn of the Prague Spring. Unlike his contemporaries Ivan Passer and Milos Forman, he didn't move to the US following the Soviet invasion of 1968, and publicly dissociated himself from his pre-invasion films, including Closely Observed Trains. Now 70 he’s able once again to work freely as a senior figure in the Czech film industry and there's no one left to complain about the political subtext in his movie, or to try to censor the sex scenes. No one will doubt the skill and exuberance with which he continues to bring to his work. This film has a zest that belies the director's age. There is no sense here of a distinguished director striking a ponderous and introspective note at the twilight of his career. Visually, I Served the King… is lithe and imaginative. It uses music, montage and silent-movie conventions with wit and energy. In Common with most of Menzel’s movies, this is based on a novel by his close friend Bohumil Hrabal, who died in 1997.

• The scenes for the Hotel Pariz restaurant were filmed in the main restaurant in Prague's Obecni Dum (Civic House), just around the corner from the actual Hotel Pariz. Both restaurants were designed in the Art Nouveau style by artist Alphons Mucha, but the Obecni Dum restaurant is larger.
• Ivan Barnev, who plays Dite, is a Bulgarian television actor much loved for his performance in the soap “Priyatelite Me Narichat Chicho”. Showered with awards for this performance, he’s now shooting major feature films... in Bulgaria.