I Served the King of England
by Jirí Menzel
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Ivan Barnev, Julia Jentsch, Marián Labuda, Milan Lasica, Oldrich KaiserDirector: Jirí Menzel
Brand: Sony
Writer: Jirí Menzel
Producer: Andrea Metcalfe
Producer: Helena Uldrichová
Producer: Petr Dvorak
Producer: Robert Schaffer
Producer: Rudolf Biermann
Writer: Bohumil Hrabal
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Czech (Original Language)
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen, 1.85:1
Running Time: 120 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2009-02-17
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Movie Reviews of I Served the King of England
Movie Review: The consequences of amorality
Summary: 5 Stars
While "I Served The King Of England" often seems to be a Chaplinesque exercise in physical comedy, it has a serious message to convey. The film is narrated by an old man just released from prison in Communist-era Czechoslovakia, recalling his life in the 1930s and 40s. Jan Dite, who as a younger man (Ivan Barnev) has gone about life untroubled by moral conscience, but is too apolitical to be of danger to anyone but himself. Dite wants nothing more in life than to be rich and have the attention of beautiful women, both goals seemingly complicated by his diminutive stature which renders him the object of derision when not ignored by his workplace colleagues. Dite, however, is aided in life by pure dumb luck; he happens to be drinking a cup of tea when a Czech general motions for it, and the general just plops a stack of large bills in his hand, which enables Dite to move on to a better station in life. Later, when he tries to give the maitre d at the Hotel Paris (Martin Huba) a hint to lower himself to receive a medal from the tiny Emperor of Ethiopia, the emperor puts it around Dite's neck instead. Beautiful women also seem to land in his lap for no explicable reason, other than decorating their naked bodies with whatever turns them on (money, flowers).
The first half of the movie ends with Dite preening in front of a mirror while a Nazi speaker, presumably Hitler, is shouting from a radio about the imminent demise of the Czech state. To Dite, it is just noise, and he turns the radio dial to a music station. We are then subtly introduced to Lise, in classic Chaplinesque fashion. Lise, played by Julia Jenstch, better known to American audiences as the anti-Nazi student in "Sophie Scholl," is seen on a sidewalk with three other young Sudeten Germans showing off their traditional German garb and new Hitler salutes. Dite ignores them as a group of rough Czech men approaches; as Dite walks past a mirror, we briefly see a scuffle between the Czechs and the young Germans. Dite is then seen watching two girls in a shop window display playing with their clothes; they notice him and react shyly. One of the girls looks at Dite, and he looks at her; is something happening here? Before something can, Dite observes three of the German youths running past him, while Lise is being handled roughly by the Czech men. He run to them to save her, but his efforts are as comically useless as befitting a featherweight such as he.
Lise is left bemoaning her fate at the hands of "inferior" Czechs, and it is at this point the film takes on a tragicomic aspect. Although Lise is a convinced Nazi, Jentsch plays her as a person with a need to find some kind of reason to feel good about herself in a country where Germans are the despised minority. She, like Dite, has no consciousness of the moral or ethical consequences of her beliefs or actions. Unlike Dite, Lise is blindly fanatical in her beliefs and whose devotion to the Fuhrer is uncomfortably close to lust, while Dite has no ideology beyond his own needs and desires. Lise clearly believes herself "superior" to Dite (she is seen deliberately walking on ledge to lord above him as if to make this very point). But after Lise does some "soul-searching" on the question of Dite's "inferior" Czech blood which would pollute her own pure Aryan blood, she decides that Dite's blond hair and blue eyes must mean that he has Aryan blood, and bizarrely convinces herself that Germans always wanted to mix their blood with Slavs--even while "subhuman" Slavs are being killed by the tens of millions in Russia. At their wedding, Dite is clearly uncomfortable about his "duty" to help populate the world with young Aryans, so much so that he feels obliged to comb his hair and grow a mustache to make himself resemble Lise's hero, Hitler.
Lise's appearance at the Hotel Paris causes Dite to lose his job, where the only individual in the film who can be even mildly be defined in heroic, principled terms--the maitre d--takes a stand against the Nazis, for which he is later taken away by the Gestapo after the Nazis take-over (barely after the ink on the Munich Agreement was dry). Dite, meanwhile, is fascinated by Lise's fanatical belief in "liberating" the Germans wherever they may be found, unmindful of what steps that would entail. Lise goes off to war after failing to produce an Aryan offspring, but not before she finds Dite new employment at a brothel he used to work for, now converted into an SS-run brothel designed to "scientifically" create biologically pure Aryans. This may sound like serious business, and it is, but it is played so tongue-in-cheek that we are made to laugh at the stupidity of it all.
Once the war starts going badly for the Germans, Dite's luck seems to be going badly as well, until Lise returns with a suitcase full of valuable stamps. She has stolen them from the homes of Polish Jews, but she acknowledges no moral qualms or even interest when Dite inquires about the Jews' current disposition. Soon afterwards, the brothel is seen burning after an Allied bombing run, and Lise is killed by collapsing beams after "rescuing" her stamp collection. Dite uses the stamps to buy the brothel after the war, and finally realize his dream to be a millionaire, until the new Communist leaders of Czechoslovakia decide that $15 million buys him 15 years in prison.
"I Served The King Of England" is a social and cultural morality tale of the kind of subtleness only seen in political satires in this country. Dite sees everything as gray when the times call for black and white judgments against right-wing fascism (much like today). Sex and nudity is also handled in social and cultural terms. To American audiences where "language" and "drug references" can bring a film an "R" rating, and TV-turned "film star" Barbie Dolls refuse to do nudity, the abundant nudity in the film may at first blush seem gratuitous, but the bevy of completely nude blond, blue-eyed Aryan women at the SS brothel seem more bemusing in their unabashed and arrogant unawareness.
In the end, this is a film that reminds us that European cinema has not abandoned the lessons learned by American cinema in the 1960s and 70s. Today, confronting hard truths about ourselves is anathema in this country, regardless of the medium.
Summary of I Served the King of England
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