As I Served the King of England opens, Jan Dítì (Oldrich Kaiser) re-enters the world a few months short of his 15-year prison sentence due to an act of undisclosed “amnesty” during World War II. He settles in a decimated tavern in a long-abandoned German settlement near the German-Czech border and, as he slowly, tenaciously repairs his new home, he flashes back on his life’s adventures leading up to his incarceration.

Turns out this grey and grizzled old man was once a wide-eyed Czech boy (played by Ivan Barnev) who sold frankfurters at train stations and amused himself by tossing coins onto the platform and watching people of all economic brackets stoop to scoop them up. Though extremely short, he rises in the ranks of the service industry — from train station to pub to upscale brothel to luxury restaurant — and is mentored by other short men along the way, including a successful Jewish businessman and an Ethiopian emperor. Yet old Europe recedes under the shadow of fascism and war, a reality to which Dítì is oblivious as it unfolds all around him. Ever the dutiful servant, he’s even distressed by how inhospitable his fellow Czechs are to their German occupiers.

Barnev plays the naïf with the skill of silent movie–era masters like Chaplin or Keaton, and his genial charm is absurdly at odds with his character’s lack of moral compass. Unfortunately, Kaiser’s performance as the older Díti does not match the personality set forward by Barnev. This problem is exacerbated by their physical differences — a choice that may be meant to suggest that the character is so changed by prison as to be a totally different person, but it’s more distracting than poignant. The film’s uneven tone also drags down the overall effect, but its ambition — to look dispassionately at the machinery of war from the perspective of a well-meaning collaborator — is worth saluting.