MOVIES .

The King and I

Life goes on, even as the world drastically changes.


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Published: Sep 3, 2008

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ARE YOU BEING SERVED? Jan Díte (Ivan Barnev) cares more about his own ambitions than the new world order.

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In 1966, Jirí Menzel's Closely Watched Trains placed a naïve young man on the edge of history, watching as world events impinged on private lives seemingly well-removed from the global stage. In many ways, Menzel's latest, his sixth adaptation of work by late Trains author Bohumil Hrabal, serves as a bookend to that early masterpiece, beginning with another wide-eyed youth on another train platform, his personal desires consuming his entire attention as the Nazis march in just offscreen.

But unlike Trains' Milos, I Served the King of England's Jan Díte is no feckless innocent. His surname translates as "Child," referring not just to his playful, boyish appearance but to his immature amorality. Though Díte is a charming imp, there's a crass cynicism to the way he tosses his pocket change to the ground, watching as wealthy men scramble after it. And while he retains his likable mischievousness throughout the film, those qualities are edged with an increasingly darker tint as Díte's growing success parallels that of his country's occupiers.

We first meet Díte as an older man, played by Oldrich Kaiser, released from prison after serving nearly 15 years for a crime not disclosed until the film's closing minutes. As he proceeds to rebuild the shell of an abandoned pub in a forest sparsely populated by other societal outcasts, he reflects upon his younger self with a mixture of shame and nostalgic whimsy.

The young Díte, who occupies most of the film's attention, is portrayed by Ivan Barnev as a Chaplin-esque scamp with boundless ambition. The influence of the Little Tramp and his ilk is made explicit early on, as Barnev's introduction is handled with sepia tints and intertitles. But even as this silent-comedy homage gives way to color and sound, Menzel retains the era's spirit and physicality, viewing Díte as a clown who climbs from penniless hot dog vendor to millionaire hotelier while turning a blind eye to the political realities surrounding him.

Of the directors who achieved success during the Czech New Wave, only Menzel remained in the country, watching while compatriots like Milos Forman emigrated to the U.S. and Hollywood success. True to that experience, there is a sense throughout I Served the King of England of being buffeted by the fickle winds of ideological change. Menzel has fallen in and out of favor with various regimes over the course of his career, and the older Díte's grinning resignation suggests an optimism earned from the losses engendered by fate.

Menzel presents Díte's memories as collage, with a rain of pocket change transforming into fluttering advertisements or a succession of sexual conquests made into artworks, draped with flowers or food or cash. It's a Proustian feast of sensual memory that plays out as the blackest of farces, one that would come off as utterly absurd if its roots weren't planted in historical fact. Nevertheless, it's a history that flashes by in a series of excesses, sins of the flesh and of gluttony, with conspicuous consumption taking center stage while the familiar litany of suffering happens somewhere beyond the edges of the frame.

If the character can be seen as an analogue for his country, then it's in the sense that the small nation's destiny is governed by the whim of the powers that surround it — and is opportunistically complicit. There are, to be sure, minor acts of heroism and protest in the face of these successive occupations, but the irony here is that the film's lead, unlike that of Closely Watched Trains, has no interest in participating in them.

Throughout Díte's upward climb, Menzel suggests that his hero's vanity and ambition — and even more pertinent, his belief that everyone else possesses the self-same failings — lend permission to look the other way as oppression takes hold. Though the character is wholly lacking in conscience to the point where he's willing to submit to blood tests to confirm an Aryan heritage in order to marry his Sudeten sweetheart — his director never fully condemns him, allowing, in the most absurdist manner, that people's lives go on even as history is rewritten around them. Díte's life is condemned by his older self, but not necessarily regretted.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

I Served the King of England | Directed by Jirí Menzel | Sony Pictures Classics release