Jan Dite (Ivan Barnev), the plucky little waiter who bounces around central Europe in Jiri Menzel’s epic comedy “I Served the King of England,” has colossal ambitions. Catering to political and military fat cats at a fancy brothel in 1930s Czechoslovakia, his appetites are piqued as he observes these pompous boors dandling prostitutes on their laps while washing down obscenely rich banquets with beer and brandy.
As the song says, “Them that’s got shall get. …” These scenes of marathon gourmandizing offer some of the most pungently satirical observations of unfettered gluttony ever filmed. While Jan serves these beasts (and discreetly services their women), his vision of becoming a wealthy hotelier begins to take shape.
This chipper protagonist, whose name means John Child, is a Chaplinesque symbol of a nation made cynical after being taken over first by Nazis and then by Communists within the span of a decade. Growing up in a place that exchanged one totalitarian nightmare for another, who wouldn’t be cynical?
Mr. Barnev, the wonderful Bulgarian actor who plays the young Jan, resembles a doll-like hybrid of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Derek Jacobi with a dash of Roman Polanski. Jan will cheerfully do what it takes to survive and flourish without political commitment or moral scruples.
“I Served the King of England” is Mr. Menzel’s sixth screen adaptation of the work of Bohumil Hrabal, the Czech satirist who died in 1997 and is best known for writing the screenplay for Mr. Menzel’s 1966 classic, “Closely Watched Trains,” as well as the novel on which it was based. There is hardly a moment in this new film in which you are not aware that its absurdist view of the human condition was shaped by traumatic 20th-century events.
