The strength and weakness of “I Served the King of England” is that it feels like something made in the late 1960s, a frisky and loudly ironic satire with a political bent.
Its broad characters might have sprung from a Tom Robbins novel, except that they came from the pen of the late Bohumil Hrabal, a writer cherished as one of the greatest Czech novelists of the late 20th century. Hrabal’s book “Closely Watched Trains” became an Oscar-wining movie in 1968, directed by Jiri Menzel.
Menzel, now 70, also directed “I Served the King of England.” It is a loony comedy that covers a good chunk of mid-century Czech history.
Its aged protagonist looks back at his life from sometime during the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. As an opportunistic young man, Jan Dite (Ivan Barnev) began by selling frankfurters at a train station before snaring a job at a big, classy hotel restaurant in Prague.
His adventures there are equal parts whimsy and sexual appetite, but history waits in the wings: It’s the late 1930s, and Hitler is about to annex Czechoslovakia before invading it altogether.
Dite’s response to this is hardly the stuff of heroism: He becomes smitten with a dictatorial German girl (Julia Jentsch, star of the very different wartime film, “Sophie Scholl: The Final Days”) whose devotion to the Third Reich leads Dite down various amoral pathways.
Menzel’s lightness is certainly refreshing; he prefers not to buttonhole you with Meaningful Points, but to traipse through the fields of absurdism. Some of this is quite funny in a way that will look familiar to anybody who’s seen a Czech comedy before.
I appreciate all that, but at the same time I confess this movie sometimes repelled me, especially in its cutesier moments. Maybe it’s the boyishness of Bulgarian actor Barnev, or the frequently juvenile attitude toward sex, but this film serves up too many grating moments to earn it a rave.
Almost entirely ignoring the Holocaust, for instance, is one of those decisions that raise questions in a distracting way. You could argue it’s a more daring tack than trying some heavy-handed point in the midst of a comedy; maybe Menzel’s tone is “unbearable lightness,” to borrow a phrase from another Czech writer.
Certainly the novel is considered a classic in Central Europe (and was banned by the Communists, always a good sign). Despite its lapses, there is something interesting loose in “I Served the King,” whose blank hero becomes a mirror for an otherwise varied cast of characters.
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