'I Served' a masterpiece of comic tragedy
"I Served the King of England" is a delectable prime dish of a movie - hilarious and sad by turns - from the great Czech director Jiri Menzel, and his great inspiration, the late writer Bohumil Hrabal, the novelist behind Menzel's 1966 Oscar-winning classic "Closely Watched Trains."
"I Served" charts the irresistible rise of a plucky but somewhat amoral young provincial waiter named Jan Dite to the top of the hotel and restaurant business in Czechoslovakia before and during World War II. Then, it follows his calamitous fall after the postwar Communist takeover.
This funny and sad, blithe and tragic movie is a masterpiece of shifting moods that transports us exhilaratingly through a dizzying backdrop of elegant Art Nouveau hotels, busy brothels and threadbare pubs, all the way from the giddy effervescent comic style of a Charlie Chaplin or an Ernst Lubitsch, to the darker humanism of an Ingmar Bergman or a Jean Renoir.
It's a nearly perfect film, I think, and one that deserves even higher praise than the fulsome applause critics have been heaping on it.
Menzel, now 70 (68 when he made the film), has a great light comic touch and a flawless eye for the pain that can lie beneath. In Jan, he creates a genuinely Chaplinesque figure, endowed with impish grace, deviltry and sadness.
Played as a young man by the boyish blond Ivan Barnev, and in old age by the quieter, gray-haired Oldrich Kaiser, Jan is a genius at both service and seduction, a sprightly dancer who, in his cherub-faced youth, can whirl his way though any dining room, pirouetting deftly with trays of treats and gleaming wine glasses.
Also a master at subtle brown-nosing, Jan ingratiates himself with almost everybody (or at least the right everybodies), later becoming the star pupil of the tall, elegant, matchless maitre de Skrivanek (deftly and beautifully played by Martin Huba), who proudly boasts "I served the King of England!"
Jan avoids problems with the burgeoning Nazi threat and invasion through his own apolitical nature, and the help of his Nazi Sudeten German wife Liza (Julia Jentsch), a woman so fascist-entranced that she stares longingly at a painting of Hitler while making love with Jan.
Politics can't be avoided forever. When Jan achieves his dream of becoming a millionaire hotel owner, the Communist takeover and his own life's darker chapters lurk just around the corner.
Watching the elfin Jan become entangled in the chains of history and politics, you can't help but think a bit of Menzel as well: of his sudden worldwide success with the now-legendary Czech New Wave and "Closely Watched Trains," of his decision to stay in Czechoslovakia after the Russian invasion, and the resulting artistic clampdown, and of the ups and downs of his career ever since.
"I Served the King of England," which Menzel prepared for more than 10 years, is definitely a high point, perhaps his highest to date, and also one of the year's best movies.
It's a luscious banquet of top-grade tragicomedy, served with impish grace, a soupçon of sadness and a dash of Chaplinesque deviltry.
"I Served the King of England"
Rating: 4 stars
Starring: Ivan Barnev, Julia Jentsch
Directed by: Jiri Menzel
Other: A Sony Pictures Classics release. At the Music Box in Chicago and the Evanston CineArts 6. Rated R for sexual situations and nudity. 120 minutes.