European Films

With Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále (I Served the King of England), veteran Czech director Jirí Menzel not only returns to the Berlin Film Festival after his 1990 Golden Bear win with Skrivánci na niti (Larks on a String), but also to the world of novelist Bohumil Hrabal, whose work he adapts for the sixth time. His latest is a delightful romp that offers not only an overview of Czech history from the middle of the last century but also pays homage to the Czech spirit of endurance. Part of the Competition here at the Berlinale, Menzel’s crowdpleaser flies lightly through heavy topics such as Nazism, Sudeten Germans and Communism with more than a wink to silent comedy. Copious and gratuitous nudity, however, could restrict the film to niche engagements and comedy festivals before finding a bigger audience on DVD and TV.

 

The stonefaced protagonist of the tale is the apolitical -- but not asexual or nonalcoholic -- Jan Díte ("Johnny Child"), who as a youth (played Bulgarian-born actor Ivan Barnev, excellent) works his way up from sausage-seller at a train station to waiter at one of the most swanky hotels in town. An early sequence in black and white at the train station is one of the highlights of the film and is both a gracious bow to silent comedy and a nice nod to Menzel’s most famous film, the 1966 Oscar-winning Ostre sledované vlaky (Closely Observed Trains), which was also in black and white and based on a Hrabal novel. The unfortunate co-participant in this scene, a businessman named Walden (Slovak actor Marián Labuda, in his fifth collaboration with Menzel), will make several more appearances in the film.

 

Another gem is the carefully choreographed and perfectly edited sequence involving the visit of the Emperor of Ethiopia to the luxurious Prague hotel where Jan has started working. Menzel prefers visual comedy to verbose banter (which makes the film a lot more accesible for non-Czech speakers) and the mise-en-scene of the official state dinner is so precise that the sequence by itself could have been a lost comedy classic short film. Menzel and Barnev effortlessly work towards the double punch line that reveals not only a small secret of the African statesman, but also bypasses Díte’s apparently infallible Maitre d Skrivánek (Slovak Hrebejk-regular Martin Huna) in favour of Jan himself (When Jan asks him why he is the perfect Maitre d, Skrivánek simply replies: “I served the King of England”).

 

Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále (I Served the King of England) is not so much concerned with the impact of political events on Jan as it is with the survival of the wannabe hotellier despite the sometimes harrowing events that transpired in mid-twentieth century Central Europe. While working with Skrivánek in Prague, the Sudetenland is occupied by the Nazis, who start arriving at the hotel too. Jan’s position on the Nazis is ambiguous: he seems to dislike them as costumers but falls in love with -- and eventually marries -- a German Sudeten girl called Líza. Interestingly, she is played by German actress Julia Jentsch, who played the Nazi-era hero Sophie Scholl in the drama of the same name but is decidedly less saintly here.

 

When it has been proven that Jan has German blood and his sperm is good enough to impregnate an Aryan girl, they make love passionately. So passionately, in fact, that Líza keeps shifting Jan’s head during intercourse so she can stare at Hitler’s portrait on the wall. What this does to Jan’s imagination is too good to be revealed here and is certain to work on the laughing muscles of many.  

 

The film's scenes in the 1930s and early 1940s are by far the best, and not only because they are the most optimistic in tone and spirit (one of the earliest scenes in fact comes with Jan's drily comical voice-over that states "It was always my luck to run into bad luck"). These scenes are in fact all shown as flashbacks as remembered by the older Jan, who has been released from a Communist-era prison in the 1950s and is sent off to settle in the now-empty Sudetenland (the Germans were expelled after WWII; the Czechs and other minorities perished in concentration camps). This Jan (now played by Oldrich Kaiser, himself born in the Sudetenland some ten years after the end of WWII) has become more world-weary, though his love for girls has still not diminished and might even redeem him.

 

Though necessary, these scenes never quite gel in the virtuoso way the younger Jan seems to skate through life, and while Jirí Brozek's editing of the pre-WWII sequences is nearly flawless, the switches between the older and younger Jan are less satisfactory and feel like an attempt to make the literary narrative device work on film -- only it never really works because the older Jan is so much less compelling. Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále is at its best when Jan is at his most innocent -- even though everything he does seems to demonstrate that the things that make the world go round are money and sex. And perhaps beer.