Not of note: Jan Díte (Ivan Barnev) is barely aware of the rise of Hitler in King of England. (photo by Martin Spelda)

Review

I Served the King of England.

by Matt Prigge

Through the ’60s, under Communist rule, the Czech New Wave burnt bright and fast, with film after film—The Shop on Main Street, Daisies, The Fifth Horseman Is Fear, the animations of Jan Svankmajer— boasting an irresistible mix of aesthetic invention and ginsu-sharp satire, usually not-so-secretly aimed at the government.

If the movement was even capable of containing an incorrigible populist, the closest would be Jirí Menzel, whose Closely Watched Trains scored the 1968 Foreign Language Oscar. But don’t hold that against it. Cute, highly exportable yet still scabrous, Trains tells of a bored young man working a railyard and chasing tail. The twist is that it’s set during the German occupation, and the film sustains a delicate tone, in which nightmare sits right next to whimsy.

Apart from his Oscar-nominated 1986 film My Sweet Little Village, the world has hardly heard from Menzel since. Unlike the wave’s biggest success, Milos Forman, who left for success in Hollywood—One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus—Menzel stayed put, fighting to get his work seen outside his homeland.

His latest, I Served the King of England, is the first to get a Stateside release in eons, and surely it doesn’t hurt that it resembles his first big success. Like Closely Watched Trains, England was adapted from author Bohumil Hrabal, and likewise concerns the wacky and horrifying misadventures of a well-meaning innocent living (eventually) under occupation.

England opens with our pseudo-hero, Jan Díte, as an older man emerging from a grimy Prague prison. He was sentenced to 15 years, he tells us, but served “only” 14 years and nine months. Why was such a sweet and harmless-looking guy there in the first place? Therein lies the tale.

As played by Ivan Barnev in a remarkably bubble-headed performance, Díte spends the ’30s floating from job to job, always on the rise. While toiling proudly in an anonymous bar, he befriends a similarly height-challenged salesman who’s so successful, he spends an evening laying his multitude of newly acquired bills, like tiles, on his vast hotel room floor.

Thus bitten by the social ascension bug, Díte proceeds through the hotel business, periodically pausing to indulge in some old-school Euro-cinema hanky-panky. (Uncannily retro, England summons an era when most people patronized foreign films for prurient reasons.)

England’s first half is light and breezy, but anyone with a passing knowledge of history knows where this is going. Díte so has the blinders on that he barely notices when the streets are suddenly crawling with German nationalists or when some stern-looking guy with a Charlie Chaplin mustache pops up on every poster.

Díte pursues the capitalist fever dream, unaware that he’s rubbing shoulders with the No. 1 villains of the 20th century. Díte even falls for a Nazi hotcha (Sophie Scholl’s Julia Jentsch), who makes him undergo medical tests to see if he’s “fit to impregnate an Aryan vagina in a dignified manner.”

There’s a point when Menzel could’ve easily tipped this into dead seriousness. He doesn’t. Like Closely Watched Trains, England sustains a twisted comic tone, and the film gets sharper as it gets darker. (Dig a yuk when a mother corrects her boy for sieg heiling with the wrong arm.)

Except for some grisliness toward the end, Díte mostly sees World War II from a very removed point of view, spending part of the war working at a picturesque chateau where eternally naked blonds wait to be impregnated by racially pure soldiers. Never does Menzel rub our noses in the film’s many brutal ironies, nor does he try to pass judgment on Díte, who comes off neither as heroic nor villainous—just someone caught up in the wheels of history.

Closely Watched Trains couldn’t quite nail the tone it wanted, but England does, and without breaking a sweat. This is the assured and deadly work of a master.