I Served the King of England.

"In filming the late Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal's I Served the King of England, Jirí Menzel (put on the international map by his 1966 prize-winning version of Hrabal's Closely Watched Trains) serves an audience with nearly no memory of World War II," writes Bill Weber in Slant. "Is that why its often cutely choreographed irony feels not only familiar and secondhand but trivializing?"

"When the movie opens, the war is over, Communism is in place, and Díte (Oldrich Kaiser, who looks like Milan Kundera would if he ever smiled) is an old man just released from prison," writes Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine. "Most of the film is occupied with flashbacks in which Díte, chastened by incarceration, reflects on the folly of his youthful ambition to become a millionaire - an ambition that, with the help of a comely German nationalist (Julia Jentsch), leads him down the SS path. Menzel constructs one lovely Conformist-inspired Art Deco set piece after another around the young Díte (Ivan Barnev) - e.g. a Nazi stud farm - but the whole is never more than the parts."

Updated through 8/31.

Menzel, notes David Denby in the New Yorker, "did not emigrate to this country, as Ivan Passer and Milos Forman, his fellow-directors of the Czech film renaissance, did. Staying behind, Menzel went through myriad ups and downs in the final twenty years of Communist rule (for a while, his work was banned) and developed, I would guess, a healthy sense of the absurd, which doubtless shaped his adaptation of Hrabal's material."

"Menzel's touch is sprightly, lyrical, mischievously understated - his hero neither good nor evil but blessed (and cursed) by tunnel vision," writes David Edelstein in New York. "How could he have guessed what the Commies would make of his wealth - or that bad luck would be his redemption?"

Earlier: Filmbrain.

Update, 8/26: "[D]espite all its problems and compromises, England still points toward interesting possibilities in combining exaggerated folklore (what we might call in America the Paul Bunyanesque) with historical inquiry (Dite could be the optimistic flipside of Berlin Alexanderplatz's Franz Biberkopf)," writes Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE. "At the very least, compared to a similarly whimsical outing like Liev Schreiber's version of Everything Is Illuminated, a typical post-Wes Anderson film whose self-conscious style completely drowns the thematic coherence of its story, Menzel's version of Hrabal's novel wittily and critically examines its historical subject - the infantile tendencies that motivate compliance with totalitarianism - and once in a while evokes the wonder other likeminded films completely overshoot."

Updates, 8/27: "Though the film may be visually fanciful - as money rains down from the sky, a glowing halo of light shines behind a character's noggin, and Busby Berkeley-like precision enlivens the simple task of serving a banquet room - any preconceived notion that this is yet another historical epic with some magic realism thrown in must be quashed," writes Aaron Hillis in the Voice. "Menzel's memorable flights of whimsy are the means, not the end; do away with the clever style and you're still left with a rousing picaresque of life's beautiful-sad ironies."

"I Served the King of England ends up a curious combination of raunchy merriment and malignant undercurrents," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "At one point, a character asks if Czechoslovakia is going to war, and another character answers bemusedly, 'We Czechs never fight wars.' This is about as ruefully honest a confession as I have ever encountered in any national cinema."

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Menzel "through an interpreter about his connection with Hrabal's work, his decision not to work in Hollywood, and the time he beat a producer in front of a film festival audience."

Updates, 8/29: "Growing up in a place that exchanged one totalitarian nightmare for another, who wouldn't be cynical?" asks Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "So busy looking out for himself that he fails to anticipate what should be obvious, Jan embodies the central European Everyman as an archetypal naïf protected by his own innocence, until reality arrives."

"Menzel cites Chaplin and Fellini as his avatars, and both of those profoundly unfashionable influences come through in this grotesque and mysterious comic confection, more bitter than sweet," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "It's a work radically out of step with contemporary American mores and styles; in a marketplace that ignores almost all foreign-language films in the first place, it stands virtually no chance. If this actually were 1968, the pipe-smoking sophisticates of Esquire and Playboy would be proclaiming I Served the King of England a nettlesome masterpiece. For whatever good it does this film today, I'll stick my pipe in my mug and agree."

David Fear in Time Out New York: "Barnev's Keatonesque performance and the movie's comic eroticism keeps things light, at least until a few questionably blithe turns reduce complex issues to sex-comedy simplicity (WWII is depicted as part Holocaust, part hot Nazi fräuleins in a pool). Menzel's balanced serving of bitterness and breeziness, however, succeeds more often than it stalls; such an achievement was worth the wait."

"A ribald black comedy about the perils of greed and apathy, the film has all the hallmarks of the Czech new wave," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club: "It's provocative, sexually frank, politically engaged, and loaded with historical absurdities and ironies."

"[T]his sumptuous, almost musically orchestrated comic fantasy founders without a well-defined edge or, for that matter, a compelling lead actor," finds Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun.

Updates, 8/31: "Menzel's sensibility requires a delicate calibration of irony and dark humor; all too often, I Served the King of England settles for mere whimsy," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "Rather than Menzel's best work, like his classic debut Closely Watched Trains, this film recalls dreck like Forrest Gump and Life Is Beautiful."

"Like the atrocious The Lives of Others, I Served the King of England sentimentalizes evil; furthermore, Menzel's movie so neutrally presents the central character's complicity in evil - that is to say, the movie cultivates a tone of wide-eyed, nostalgic innocence for the most questionable acts - that I, without virtue of having read Hrabal's book, cannot quite tell what Menzel's aiming for." NP Thompson at the House Next Door.

Posted by dwhudson at August 25, 2008 9:13 AM