A
group of travelers tremor, nap and nod on a dusty tour bus. The
driver sleepily persists against the relentless nothingness,
steering his passengers through the heat of the uninhabitable desert
nowhere toward their destination. It's night and they have no clue
where they are. They doze, adjust a walkman, swat an imaginary fly.
The journey shouldn't take quite this long but no one questions the
route until the red gashes of dawn pierce the sky. The driver drones
on he's following the requisite 180 degrees on the compass. But when
he swerves the bus, the compass doesn't move. The stains, sweat and
dry mouth garnered over a long, arid night of travel increase...
The
group stumbles across a deserted town, check the gas tanks, which
are empty, feed the bus with kerosene, believe for one moment
they're saved - and find they're doomed. The heat intensifies and
after one member extols the five rules of survival to his
compatriots and embarks upon a trek through the eternal sands
("If I make it I'll be back in five days," he tells them),
leaves them to the extremes of not just an environmental nature but
a more elementally vicious and predatory nature - the human variety.
Soon,
alliances form, marital cracks become visible, hates and lusts
emerge and facades are stripped away. Survival is the order of the
day, and it is decided to perform King Lear as a diversionary
tactic and form of civilization, when strangely enough, life begins
to imitate art.
Such
is the preface to this story of madness, marital discord and mayhem
- a sort of Lord of the Flies meets Shakespeare. But love it,
hate it, "The King Is Alive" will generate few maudlin,
middle ground opinions.
It's
the fourth film from Dogme 95, the Danish collective that includes
the film's director, Kristian Levring, and filmmakers Lars Von Trier
(The Idiots), Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration) and
Soren Kragh Jacobsen (Mifune). The only American to receive a
Dogme 95 acknowledgement - Harmony Korine - received an honorary nod
for his low-tech movie, Julien Donkey-Boy.
The
collective espouses a philosophy that purports to retrieve the
current cinema from the miasma in which it rests by relieving their
own films from "certain tendencies in the cinema today."
The rules rest in a "vow of chastity" that the quartet
have signed and which basically strip away the technological frills
of big-studio moviemaking and getting back to basics - the essence
of story telling and making.
So
does this Dogme director fulfill his vow? Surprisingly, The King
Is Alive finds its strength in its technology and visuals. It's
shot on digital video and the format is artful and artfully
regenerative against characters who, though essentially supporting -
Miles Anderson, Lia Williams, the late Brion James and Romane
Bohringer; powerfully savage - the great Janet McTeer, who brings
ferocity, honesty and empathy to the film's fullest role; victim -
Jennifer Jason Leigh, who, after roles in Last Exit to Brooklyn,
The Hitcher and Georgia meets another kind of maker
altogether here; and weak - Bruce Davison as a henpecked husband who
ultimately has the right stuff - live or die by the desert's cruel
rules.
Review by Paula Nechak · Nitrate Online
