Jiri Menzel’s I SERVED THE KING OF ENGLAND is a delightful genre best described as romp played as tragedy. Or tragedy played as a romp. That’s the key to why it this tale of hope, ambition, and the unexpected importance of postage stamps in uncertain times is such a bitingly effective exercise in satire. The comedy and the tragedy aren’t so much blended together as they are one and the same thing. No mean feat considering that the story covers the exploitation of the worker by capitalists in the 20s, the annexation of Czechoslovakia by the Third Reich in the 30s, World War II in the 40s. and the proletarian paradise that arose afterwards.
Those momentous events, and those momentous only to himself, are told by Dite, a small man from a small village who sought his fortune in the big city and who was unfortunate enough to get his wish. As he explains, though, at the beginning of the film, his luck was never of the best. That wish was be to be a millionaire and own his own hotel, but how that came about, and what led to his incarceration and release after 15 years in prison that starts the film is a lively scamper through decadence, desire, and the conflation of food and sex such that hasn’t been seen in cinema since TOM JONES. Exiled to the Czech border, Dite is assigned the backbreaking job of maintaining roads by breaking rocks into gravel. His fellow exiles include a nubile redhead of easy virtue, and a disgraced professor of French and aesthetics, and Dite’s reminiscences, both to them and to himself take the story back and forth in time with nifty cuts by Menzel that place Dite in both times, though played by two different actors. Ivan Barnev as the younger man with a winsome expression, a puckish charm, and a raffish eagerness, Oldrich Kaiser, as the older Dite, still a bit puckish, but eagerness suffused into a weariness that can still appreciate a good-looking woman and a good glass of beer.
A chance meeting with Mr. Walden, a millionaire who takes a shine to him, leads to Dite’s awakening to the power of money, which he pursues wholeheartedly and with the same zeal as his pursuit of women. Starting as a vendor of hotdogs in a railway station, he moves up, thanks to Mr. Walden’s recommendations, from an apprentice waiter with a knack for chess and seducing prostitutes, to a waiter in a chic bordello that caters to the elite, to one at the most elegant place in the world, as far as Dite is concerned, the Hotel Paris.
Menzel fill the screen with images that are undeniably beautiful, but images that represent the very worst about human nature. Mr. Walden lining up his cash in neat rows across a rich carpet; diplomats dancing with wild abandon over the Ethiopian food at a banquet, where the main course was paraded in with pomp and a bleat that sounded like a plea to not be slaughtered; beautiful women for hire and their uber-rich clients having food fights with victuals worth more than an average person’s house, and having a snowball fight in summer. This is Dite’s memory palace and having no philosophy other than gain, no moral compass other than the delights of the bank or the flesh, even the racist hard line voiced by his German sweetie Liza, (Julia Jentch) fails to register. Though the final comeupance of that last sentiment is a scene that is not beautiful but rather a stabbing descant to the decadence that came before as Dite and Walden meet for a final time. Small, blond, usually wearing a collar too big by half, and until then not at all important, to be accepted as a honorary Aryan by the conquering Nazis is almost as good as being a millionaire, though a clever bit of CGI inserted during a bout of conjugal bliss between Dite and Liza is as grotesque as it is blessedly brief.
I SERVED THE KING OF ENGLAND is the education of an opportunist and a sensualist who had trouble seeing beyond the moment at hand until it was too late, and who finally takes that long look at himself and the world that was far too long in coming. The end brings him neatly full circle in what cannot be construed as redemption, but rather the still satisfying illumination of a life examined and accepted.
Your Thoughts?