Release Date: Aug. 22 (limited)
Director/Writer: Jiri Menzel
Cinematographer: Jaromír Sofr
Starring: Oldrich Kaiser, Ivan Barnev, Julia Jentsch
Studio/Run Time: Sony Pictures Classics, 118 mins.
Shaggy-dog fable about Nazis, nymphs and moral compromise
In the 1960s, Jiri Menzel subverted the Eastern Bloc status quo with black humor, sexual candor and ethical dissections of Czech mass psychology. Films like Closely Watched Trains (1967) became touchstones for a movement. Now, Menzel returns with I Served the King of England, which constitutes the nostalgic reverie of a grizzled jailbird named Jan (Oldrich Kaiser). Fixing up a remote shack, he happens on an old pint glass and flashes back to his 1930s youth as a waiter in a pub. Young Jan (Ivan Barnev) is an impish soul who delights in tossing his spare change in the air, then watching as people crawl on their hands and knees to collect it. Gradually, he develops bigger ambitions and the wherewithal to chase them.
The story grows darkly absurd when Jan falls in love with a German girl (Julia Jentsch) on the eve of World War II, and she converts him to Hitler worship. Everyone is shipped off to concentration camps, but lucky Jan is deemed genetically fit to procreate with a daughter of the Reich. Eventually, he becomes a servant at a luxury hotel whose occupants are nymphs chosen to receive certified Aryan seed in a eugenics program. In a resonant stroke, Menzel signals a reversal of fortunes when the naked romping blonds change overnight into German soldiers who have lost their limbs. It’s an incisive moment in a shaggy-dog parable that could use a lot more of them.