Saturnin is a somewhat special servant who enters the service of a young man with good social status and upbringing and somewhat conservative views. He repeatedly turns his life upside down, but ultimately only for his own good. Whether it's his arbitrarily changed living situation, his reputation as an adventurer based on rumors or, above all, his clever and effective way of dealing with his demanding Aunt Kateřina - he adds variety to his master's previously rather peaceful and predictable life and is a truly helpful spirit in the process. This also indirectly benefits love. In all absurd situations, Saturnin maintains his serious English butler's expression, as is only fitting.

Saturnin has been a household name in Bohemia for several generations. In 1942, the writer and journalist Zdeněk Jirotka (1911-2003) wrote a book with this title, which has since been published twelve times. Readers love it for its dry humor, not unlike "English", the amount of parody and exaggeration and, above all, for the absurd situations in which the peculiar servant Saturnin gets everyone around him into.

This film will be shown as part of the "Czech Film Wednesday" series, as always in the original version with German subtitles.

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(This is an automatic translation by DeepL Translator.)

Czech Republic, 1994, 97 min, OmU

Director: Jiří Věrčák
Original: Zdeněk Jirotka (screenplay)
Screenplay: Magdalena Wagnerová, Jiří Věrčák

The actors play: Oldřich Vízner, Ondřej Havelka, Lucie Zedníčková, Lubomír Lipský st., Milan Lasica, Jana Synková, Petr Vacek, Ota Jirák, Jitka Molavcová, Valérie Zawadská

(This is an automatic translation by DeepL Translator.)

This film was probably a gamble at the time of its creation: it is based on a very well-known book, which immediately raises the bar. The director had never made a feature film for the cinema before. The cast does not include any of the big, well-known names of Czech cinema. And at a time shortly after the fall of communism, when many people were looking elsewhere in the world and domestic films were not having an easy time of it. Unfortunately, we cannot reconstruct how the film was received by audiences in the 1990s, but it is now one of the most popular Czech films (according to csfd.cz). So the gamble paid off - at least in the long term.

Ondřej Havelka, the actor playing Saturnin's master and not to be confused with the director Jiří Havelka, worked only occasionally as an actor after the Velvet Revolution and instead devoted himself to his great passion, swing music. Together with his Melody Makers, for example, he opened the Czech-German Culture Days 2022.

(This is an automatic translation by DeepL Translator.)