"It was always my luck to run into bad luck," comments ex-jailbird Jan Dite after being released from a 15-year-stretch by an amnesty. With three months to serve.

It's this sort of ironic twist of fate that has dogged the hapless optimist in a life crammed with incident in his craven pursuit of personal wealth.

As a dirtpoor hotdog hawker on a station platform he decided he would make it his life's ambition to become a millionaire…and started his uncertain climb up the greasy pole.

Upsizing to an elegant beer hall patronised by Prague's middle-class businessmen, he soaked up overheard conversations about how to swell the coffers.

At the same time he found himself instructed in the pleasures of the flesh by a winsome harlot in the local brothel. Money and sex, he discovered, could make a happy union.

Food, too, played a part in his fiscal and carnal education thanks to lessons learned in a luxury hotel catering for portly industrlalists with a liking for turtle soup and game young fillies.

Onwards and upwards Jan climbed, until Adolf Hitler's expansionist inclinations meant that Czechoslovakia is not really the best place to be. But that's alright - he'd hooked up with a German fraulein with a blood purity obsession.

Dear diary, what a life it's been. Surreal flourishes and absurd situations abound in director Jiri Menzel's bawdy chronicle of a young man on the make during Czechoslovakia's recent turbulent history.

Just about anchored in reality, Dite gamely slips through a wealth of barking scenarios. Some are sweet - he's decorated for wine-pouring services by the king of Ethiopia. Some less so - he acquires untold riches courtesy of priceless stamps stolen from Holocaust victims.

Somehow the whole fantastical concoction never stumbles, pulled neatly together with the older and wiser Dite finally learning that money really can't buy you happiness.

Tim Evans