Fifteen years after he was first incarcerated, Jan Díte (Oldrich Kaiser) is released from prison, and is happy to leave, though if he's honest he has mixed feelings. At least he does not have to wonder about what he can do now, as the Czech authorities assign him to a job near the German border, where most of the ex-criminals go, where he will lay gravel onto roads. As he settles into his new life, and renovates the dilapitated tavern he was offered to live in, he recalls for us the path he has taken to this point, and how his dreams of being a millionaire led him to an unlikely state of affairs as he drifted through his existence...
Drifting because you don't really get the impression that anything truly affects Díte until the end where he comes to terms at where he has been led and realises that he has learned something, even if it is too late to do anything about his lessons by the time he has become settled as an innkeeper at the end of the film. But the journey he has taken to reach this state of bitterswet calm is what most concerns him, and us for that matter, as he is played in his younger self by Ivan Barnev, a slight and diminutive blond fellow who starts out selling frankfurters to railway passengers, notices what people do for money, small change included, and makes up his mind to make his fortune.
He does this by becoming a waiter, and we trail him through a selection of jobs at various hotels and restaurants and cafes, all the while building up his reserves of cash and having not too serious brushes with the opposite sex: he loves women, but you never get the impression that he takes them completely seriously until the second half of the movie. This had meant director Jirí Menzel, still working in his elderly years, was accused of objectifying the female characters, who are barely characters at all and might as well have been smiling, frequently unclothed models. Yet we have to accept that we are seeing everything through Díte's eyes, and when he does get around to falling in love, his shallowness gets him into a bad situation.
Before that happens, we are treated to beautifully filmed and lightly humorous sequences where the protagonist virtually dances around the other people, never alighting in any one place for too long. This means he's not exactly the finest hero we could be following through all those years of Czech upheaval, which takes in the Second World War and the eventual communist grip on power, as all of it has so little impact on him; at times we can hardly believe he has any inner life at all. He's barely an observer, so while we can trust what he tells us, he deliberately stays on the periphery, occasionally taking actions towards his personal happiness, such as adorning naked women with flowers or food, though what he actually wants is enough money to do what he wants.
It is when the Nazis invade that the tone deepens and darkens, as Díte falls for a German teacher who has ended up in Prague. He feels sorry for her when she is attacked in the street by Czechs, and makes up his mind to look after her from then on, even to the point of getting a medical checkup to ascertain whether he is physically appropriate enough to have children with an Aryan woman. The Nazis decide he is, and he is married, whereupon the satire that was evident in the source material, a novel by Bohumil Hrabal that was banned by the communists, is brought out as all his wife Lise (Julia Jentsch) is more enamoured of the fascist cause than she will ever be of her husband. All of this never elicits anything more than a wry smile, as Díte can be frustrating in his refusal to engage with anything important other than his bank account, but he does awaken his conscience by the close of the story, which leaves a contemplative air. Music by Ales Brezina.
I think we're meant to find Jan Dite frustrating. He is a pleasure seeker, embodying all the hedonism that marked the Roaring Twenties, but also the self-interest that led facism to creep in through the back door during the Thirties. There were more than a few people like that in Europe, but as you say, he does learn his lesson by the end.
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