The King is Alive
review by Paula Nechak, 1 June 2001

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.

Though The King Is Alive is compulsive viewing, it harbors a chilly reserve and distance despite the desert's heat, and its characters teeter on a highwire of unavailablity and inaccessibility to viewers. And if there's no sympathetic voice to follow it doesn't matter how much talent is visible. Its characters are not only stranded in the desert, they're stranded in a script that, while it has a thrilling concept is fatally flawed. It never reveals enough history or information about these people to muster empathy for their inclusive and wholly unexplained - not eventual - biases and actions. Truth is, The King Is Alive is admirable within its centric, hallucinatory, innovative visual excitement. But it rarely fulfills the vow of story telling.

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