I Served the King of England  /  The Snowdrop Festival

I Served the King of England  (Czech Republic/Slovakia, 2006)

Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále

Czechoslovakia's turbulent 20th century forms the backdrop for an ambitious young man’s fanciful pursuit of fame and fortune in the hospitality industry by whatever means necessary. Jan Díte starts out selling hot dogs from a train station platform and through a variety of scams works his way up from beer hall waiter to maître d' of Prague’s most prestigious hotel before becoming owner of a palatial country resort. Tracking his rise are the calamities of the Nazi occupation and the postwar Communist takeover both of which Jiří Menzel treats with equal measures despair and absurdity. (The sequence in which Jan’s beloved resort is transformed by the Nazis into a breeding spa for Aryan beauties seems like something out of Mel Brooks). On finally achieving his dreams, Jan is unceremoniously sent to prison by a proletariat committee as a property owner. The entire film unfolds as a flashback on his release 15 years later and is intercut with his re-education in the present at a remote mountain camp where, naturally, a pretty young Czech woman, similarly sentenced, helps him with his “studies.” Based on a 1971 novel by Bohumil Hrabal, I Served The King of England was a dream project for Menzel that took him three decades to finally bring to the screen.

35mm, color, in Czech, German, French, English, Italian and Korean with English subtitles, 113 min. Director: Jiří Menzel. Cast: Václav Neckár, Josef Somr, Vlastimil Brodský, Vladimír Valenta, Alois Vachek.

The Snowdrop Festival  (Czechoslovakia, 1984)

Slavnosti snezenek

The cool, placid rhythms of village life in the Kreskel Forest are suddenly disrupted when a boar hunt goes wrong and the beast crosses county lines before being brought down outside the local elementary school. The incident sparks a jurisdictional battle between two villages over who has claim to the meat until it’s decided that everyone will share in the spoils in a great feast at the local beer house. The infinitely amicable solution and the feast’s detailed preparation forms the barest narrative excuse for Jiří Menzel to lovingly catalog a rich parade of local idiosyncrasies and private passions that lend the place its timeless charm. Only the bluish glow of television screens piercing the forest at night through curtained windows suggest it all might be soon homogenized out of existence.

35mm, color, in Czech with English subtitles, 83 min. Director: Jiří Menzel. Cast: Rudolf Hrusínský, Jaromír Hanzlík, Josef Somr, Petr Cepek, Miloslav Stibich.