Poster for Jirí Menzel’s ‘I Served the King of England’

I don’t see them as comeback kids, but rather, old school folk churning out the occasional gem and still knowing their ways about the process. Filmmaking is not like learning how to ride a bike. Just ask Wim Wenders. With a lot less frequency than a Woody Allen or a Jacques Rivette, the director behind 1966’s Closely Watched
Trains, was recently cited for his skill with a Best Foreign film nomination. Sony Pictures Classics has got Jirí Menzel’s I Served the King of
England on tap for a mid August release. We have the large poster below.

Based on a picaresque novel by Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal, this is the burlesque rise and fall of an apprentice waiter in Prague during the first half of the last century. Jan Dítě (Ivan Barnev) is short in height, but high in ambition. To put it bluntly, the young provincial waiter wants to become a millionaire. And he knows just how to do it: by hearing everything, seeing everything, and creating opportunities at every turn. Armed with this knowledge and an irrepressible wish to please, he soon leaves his first place of employment, a pub, for a luxury brothel and, finally moving onto an elegant Art Nouveau Prague restaurant. But by the late 1930s, things are changing: Hitler has taken the Sudetenland region and is breaking apart Czechoslovakia. Jan falls in love with Líza (Julia Jentsch), a Sudeten German proud of her Aryan blood. They marry, and soon after Líza is sent to serve on the Polish front, while Jan remains behind to serve as a nurse in a Nazi SS Research Hospital, but when she returns, she has a fortune in rare stamps that Jews had ‘left behind’ … After Líza’s less than heroic death, Jan sells the stamps and becomes … a millionaire. But he only has three years to enjoy his fortune: the new Communist regime puts him behind bars for 15 years, one for each of his millions… Upon his release from jail, Jan is sent to live in a decrepit border town. Here Jan reflects on the events that have shaped his life – and to reflect on what might have happened if he had played a different role in these events.