Dialogue: Jiri Menzel

Aficionados of the work of veteran Czech director Jiri Menzel know all about the passion he brings to his films. "Closely Watched Train" -- the 1966 film that established him at the age of 28 as one of the rising stars of the Czech 'New Wave' and won him an Oscar in 1968 -- contains one of the world's most memorable (and arguable erotic) movie scenes when, as train despatcher Hubicka (Josef Somer) seduces the beautiful Zdenka (Jitka Zelenohorska), he lovingly decorates her bare behind with official railway rubberstamps. The offending bottom -- and Swastika-embossed stamps -- are later paraded before court officials examining misuse of state property in Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia. Hilarious, saucy, erotic and subversive -- the film's sly digs at the Nazi regime would not have been lost on local audiences suffering under the oppressive Communist regime of the 1960s -- the film is a masterpiece. The movie was the first of a number of adaptations of Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal's gifted works that Menzel made; his adaptation of "Larks on a String" a tragicomedy about political prisoners sent to work in a junkyard, shot in 1969, was banned by the Communists. It was finally released in 1990 and immediately won the Golden Bear at that year's Berlinale. Now, after an absence of 17 years, Menzel is back in competition again with another film based on a Hrabal novel with an equally intriguing history: "I Served the King of England."