Lee Fang
Stills from the 2007 film I Served the King of England
In the mirror flashes back clips of Jane Dieter's youth, large and small fragments, overlapping images, in fact, it is exactly the division and struggle of a small man in the big era, which is a portrayal of the turmoil of the Czech Republic and even Europe for half a century
"My happiness often comes from the misfortunes I have encountered."
At the beginning of the movie "I Once Served the King of England", the little protagonist Czech Jane Dieter said so. Imprisoned for nearly 15 years, Jane Dieter was released by amnesty and stood at the gates of prison, his life full of ups and downs unfolding in his memories.
On the night of August 20, 1968, hundreds of thousands of modernly armed Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops invaded Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, overnight by means of surprise attacks. Since then, a long night has descended on this small European country.
"I Served the King of England" is the most famous Czech literary giant, Bohumir Hrabar, wrote in this long dark night. In 2006, after more than a decade of long litigation, Czech director Illy Manzo finally got his wish and put it on the screen, and the film was immediately sensational, at this time, Hrabar had died for 10 years.
Bohumir Hlabar
Born in 1914, Hrabar's life can be described as ups and downs. He attended law school in his youth, but soon dropped out of school after the German invasion and the Nazi closure of all Czech institutions of higher learning, and did not complete all courses until the end of the war to receive a doctorate. However, he did not go down the academic road step by step, but started from warehousekeepers, railroad workers, steelmakers, packers, salesmen, theater sets, dragon sets, actors, "For me, the most important thing is life, life, life." It is this rich life experience that Hrabar's works are always full of exuberant vitality and seemingly random literary brilliance. Hrabar published his first work at the age of 49, which can be described as a late success, but since then he has frequently won awards and has been quickly accepted by the world literary world. After the fall of Czechoslovakia, Hrabar was one of the writers who refused to express public support for the occupation under severe sanctions by the newly established authorities.
The political withdrawal and literary marginalization made Herabal feel very sad, and he even had the idea of taking his own life. Fortunately, the wife had bought a humble wooden house in a wooded open space on the outskirts of Prague, and it was in this almost isolated place that Hrabar found a spiritual home. Hrabar was deeply inspired by the story of the small owner of the Blue Star Hotel in Satska Town who told the story of his former apprenticeship in the hotel, and he was so inspired that in just 18 days, he became this 5-chapter, 130,000-word masterpiece "I Served the King of England", and it is rare that he has not been revised word for word since.
It is not difficult to imagine how Hrabar completed this work with great indignation in the strong summer sun. "The sun-drenched typewriter has jammed once a minute many times. I couldn't look directly at the bright white paper, nor could I check the typed manuscript, but just typed mechanically in the bright light. The sunlight dazzled me, and all I could see was the outline of the shining typewriter. The tin roof was illuminated for several hours, so hot that the paper that had been typed was rolled into a barrel. It was not until twenty years later, in 1989, that the work was officially published by the Czechoslovak Writers' Publishing House as one of the "three novellas.". In the novel's "Author's Note", Hrabar writes with emotion.
In his fanatical work, Hrabar had hoped that one day, he would have the time and courage to think carefully and revise the manuscript to perfection, but no, 46 years later, the work has maintained its indelible charm with its natural simplicity.
"Notice what I want to tell you now. As soon as I arrived at the Golden Prague Hotel, our boss grabbed my left ear and said, 'You are an apprentice, remember!' You don't see anything, you hear nothing! The boss tugged at my right ear again and said, 'But you must remember that you must see everything and hear everything!' And so I started my job. "Hrabar's story begins here. In Ely Manzo's film, this interesting text is merely a flash of time as a shot. Hrabar's time-propelled narration becomes, under the lens of Ely Manzo, a parallel narrative of two stages of Jane Dieter's life, one is the stage when he is a pioneering young man, his career progression gradually matures, and the other is the stage when he returns to his authenticity and pursues inner peace after he is old and physically exhausted from prison. The overlapping cycle of the two narratives makes the film have a magnificent epic temperament under the appearance of dilution and peace.
The diminutive, shallow Jane Dieter is a penniless restaurant waitress, but despite his humble status, he has always had two dreams: to become a millionaire who spends a lot of money one day, and to be able to own his own hotel and achieve a career. In the ever-changing world, he struggled, trekked, climbed, in order to survive to the position of the restaurant foreman who "served the King of England", the god of fate continued to favor, he relied on the skills of seeing six roads and listening to the eight directions, he soon rose on his career ladder ... in the turbulent social changes step by step to the peak of success, and finally became the owner of the most luxurious hotel in Prague, living a drunken and dreamy life.
World War II was finally over, and Dieter's wife, Lisa, returned to Prague with rare stamps looted from the homes of deported Jews, with which they made a fortune, but an accidental fire killed Lisa, and Jane Dieter had the "Dieter Hotel" after herself. However, the good days were short-lived, and Dieter was sentenced by the new Czech communist regime for colluding with the Germans, and all his property was confiscated and imprisoned. Nearly 15 years of prison life is fleeting, the former energetic Dieter walked out of the prison, full of hair, alone, looking back on his life, everything in the past is like a gorgeous and trance dream.
The elderly Jane Dieter was dead-hearted, and the young Jane Dieter dreamed big. With two parallel narrative threads, the seventy-year-old Eli Manzo handles Hrabar's story with great weight. Ely Manzo has adapted six of Hrabar's works, including the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, "The Watched Train" and the Berlin Golden Bear Award for "Wingless Sparrow", and it turns out that he is indeed the unassailable choice for adapting Hrabar's work.
In the form of images, Eli Manzo perfectly maintains the diametrically opposed emotional atmosphere created by Hrabar's words—tension and relaxation, exaggeration and caution, seriousness and playfulness, coldness and fanaticism, fantasy and reality, peace and waves—and allows the film's themes to switch freely between different keywords. He uses several figurative concepts—mirrors, roads, money—to express the infinite richness and infinite possibilities of subject matter, lurking beneath the sea of Jane Dieter's gushing, near-flood narratives. The name of the film is "I have served the King of England", after watching the film, I know that Jane Dieter's life has nothing to do with the King of England, this sentence is actually taken from Jane Dieter asking the hotel foreman why he is proficient in all kinds of hospitality, every time, the foreman always replied, "I have served the King of England." ”
In the film, Jane Dieter is inferior because of his short stature, so he often uses some unexpected tricks to "elevate" himself and win satisfaction. He likes to throw coins on the ground unexpectedly, spying on the gaffes of people's frenzied picking; he has experienced many women: Yalukash in paradise, Vanda, the maid at the Hotel of Tranquility, Eurenka in the Paris Hotel, and Lisa, a German teacher. Whenever she and her female companions indulge in the gentle land, Jane Dieter will always use fancy ornaments to pose a wonderful pattern on the carcasses of female companions, and with the help of a mirror, let the female companions look at their wonderful self, "For women, I understand love and bed games, starting from my flowers on their belly." At the end of the film, Jane Dieter places several mirrors in an empty room, and in the mirror flashes back jane Dieter's youth fragments, where the mirror completes the theme of the film, large and small fragments, overlapping images, and the reflection of virtual reality, which is actually the division and struggle of a small man in the big era, which is a portrayal of the turmoil of the Czech Republic and even Europe for half a century.
Jane Dieter likes to look behind the beer mug and observe all sorts of distorted human figures. Aren't these distorted human figures a reflection of the Czechs? They hold a cup in their hands, there are innate happy cells in their bodies, but there are historical hidden pains that are difficult to discharge, they have exaggerated joys and sorrows, and they also have bloody storms that hurt through the bone marrow, and Eli Manzo uses boundless humor to express the sorrow and desolation of the Czech Republic, which is his talent and strength, and also his silent cruelty, and it is precisely in this cruelty that the suffering and strength of a nation are silently highlighted.
Hrabar was obsessed with traditional Chinese culture, especially Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, and it was precisely as the composure and ethereality of Eastern philosophy often appeared in his works, which was also reflected in this film. "People, always in the accident, can become real people, in the time of collapse, derailment, disorder." 」 At the end of the film, Jane Dieter says that it is almost a portrayal of Herabal's turbulent and displaced life. In 1996, Hrabar fell from the fifth floor of a hospital and died, suicide or did he kill him? It's still a mystery. In his pen, after Jane Dieter was released from prison, he was banished to the border forest of Ged and built a road that could never be repaired, but here Jane Dieter made a meaningful arrangement for what happened to him: the wreckage flowed along the river from the north and south to the north, and finally converged in the Atlantic Ocean, thus completing the completion of his life.
Where misfortune and blessing depend, where blessings and misfortunes lie. Who knows what it is? It is not positive. Sincerely!
Author: Li Fang Deputy Director of the Literature and Art Department of People's Daily, Senior Journalist, Doctor of Literature and Art of Chinese Min University.