Jiri Menzel, the Czech director who made such classics as Closely Observed Trains before his career was stymied for years by the communist authorities, returns to his best form with this picaresque tale based on a novel by Bohumil Hrabal.

It’s the story of Jan Dite (played by Ivan Barnev when young, then Oldrich Kaiser), a provincial waiter who determines to become a millionaire by hearing and seeing everything, and then using the resultant information. He moves from a pub to a brothel and then to an elegant Prague restaurant before Hitler takes Sudetenland and he marries a German; together they make a fortune selling rare stamps that belonged to Jews who have been either killed or deported.

But after the war the Communists put him behind bars for 15 years, one for each of his millions. It allows him to reflect on his life and Menzel to detail it with an ironic humour in which film-makers of the Eastern Bloc used to specialise.

The result is a unique film, relating the strange history of Menzel’s country along with the absurd life of a central character who, in Hrabal’s terms as well as those of the director, mirrors the Czech character. There are some marvellously funny moments, often tied to Menzel’s clear passion for the beauty and sexiness of women. They should have called it Closely Observed Czechs.