When, for example, the maitre d' in that Prague restaurant makes a bold subversive gesture to the occupying Nazis, Jan is sympathetic. Stuff is always happening to him, and he reacts to circumstances but never acts upon them. Throughout these low-key adventures, Jan maintains his air of wide-eyed innocence. The proceeds from its sale enable him to buy the spa, which is where the new Communist regime finds him and, in essence, punishes him as much for his lack of current ideological enthusiasm as for his wartime collaboration with the enemy. By then, however, Jan has married a Hitlerite, who dies leaving him an invaluable stamp collection she has liberated from a Holocaust victim. In time, as the war goes badly for the Germans, it becomes a military hospital. That establishment becomes a camp full of often naked Nazi boys and girls, earnestly attempting to create a genetically perfected Master Race. He begins as a waiter in a provincial pub and moves on to a posh Prague restaurant, then to service in a high-end spa.
He's an expert listener, overhearing conversations that enable him to rub off his rough edges and advance his interests. Jan may be a geopolitical dimwit, but he is extraordinarily shrewd when it comes to his own career in the restaurant business. His recollections form the substance of writer-director Jirí Menzel's wry yet wiry fable. After jail, he's exiled to a remote corner of the country, where he has plenty of time to reflect on the error of his ways. When we meet him, however, he is being discharged, penniless, from a Communist-era Czechoslovakian prison, having served a term of almost 15 years because more or less accidentally, and certainly without malice aforethought, he ended up very profitably on the Nazi side during the war. He's just someone who wants to get rich as quickly as possible, which in the course of I Served the King of England he briefly does. Follow Dítĕ (Ivan Barnev) is a little guy short in stature, and short on political awareness and social conscience as well.
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