Review: I Served The King of England

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When “Cookie’s Fortune” was released, I interviewed Robert Altman and Charles Dutton together, and I asked something Altman was game for, but which led Dutton to widen his eyes as if I’d said something unspeakable and to say with wonderment, laughing, “Man!” Question: what’s the difference between a young director’s movie and an old director’s movie? In the case of 70-year-old Jiri Menzel’s “I Served The King of England,” almost nothing. While known for his 1966 Oscar-winning “Closely Watched Trains,” Menzel has continued to work in the Czech Republic, unlike his peers Ivan Passer and Milos Forman, who emigrated and brought their quirky perspective into other cultures. “I Served The King of England” is surely speckled with Czech-specific jokes that are missing to the outside viewer, but its absurdist, lovingly choreographed portrait of one man’s Forrest Gump-like passage through large patches of twentieth-century Czechoslovakia, adapted, like “Trains,” from a piece by Bohumil Hrabal, still leaves a lingering smile. Menzel’s lead, Ivan Barnev, is short on charm, but the movie’s chronicles of the character’s life as a waiter, manages to weather intermittent flatness. Menzel is also unabashed in his love for putting women on display, and a sex scene with a Hitler fetish is appropriately odd amid the general air of whimsy. An opportunity to interview Menzel at a festival in Thessaloniki was canceled on account of a cold, but afterward, he was as affable in passing as this movie is serenely daffy. 118m. (Ray Pride)