2018 Directed by Albert Serra
Louis XIV is no newcomer to Albert Serra’s filmography, the hero of his latest opus to date, THE DEATH OF LOUIS XIV (2016). ROI SOLEIL features a twin, even though, in the game of differences, it turns out that there are quite a few. Instead of Jean-Pierre Léaud, a non-professionnal actor whom Serra already worked with in his first films.
Der Sonnenkönig
Albert Serra remaking the Leaud movie with his regular Lluis Serrat slowly dying as Louis XIV minus literally any dramatic element. Roi Soleil is unwatchable outside of some moments of shallow picturialism. One might argue that there's something on the dialetical constrast between the early film maximalism and the minimalism here, but one might also point out that The Death of Louis XIV already carried that contrast in itself. Anyway one has to respect the amount of perversity on display here. It is filmmaking as a troll act at such a level the dane charlatan couldn't even begin to dream of.
Virtualmente impossível que eu assista algo pior esse ano. Só pode ser sacanagem.
J'ai enfin trouvé de quoi me consoler de ne rien comprendre à Star Wars. Je me demande qui d'autre que moi trouve aussi drôle ce théâtre rouge d'agonie princière. Un excellent film de première date !!!
It took me 10 days to finish this and I am confused. I feel very embarrassed for watching this.
Not sure what to make of this as yet - the relationship between spectacle and subservience is carried over from Death of Louis XIV but it may be pushed even farther here...but the more it sits with me, the more I'm kind of thrilled by it. As though a sort of punkish pushback to all the critics who read (and praised!) Louis XIV as just a bourgeois art-film and didn't go between the lines. In a way, this is one of the ultimate trolls and might be kind of ingenious: Death of Louis XIV brought back to its initial conception - as a museum performance-piece. But it's not that the performance piece is filmed - it's that the film is the performance art itself. Perverse (not in a sick way) - the ultimate troll, down with institution-ready art!
Pretentious to the bone. Borders on offensive, even. It's painfully funny how this so perfectly exemplifies the empty, self-important, insufferable kind of cinema one would expect from that stereotypical figure of the equally empty, self-important, insufferable 'alternative' filmmaker (is Serra like this?? I have no idea!! Let's hope not!!). This being about Louis XIV is actuallly fitting, but it does not suffice. Apparently the performance was comissioned by a gallery in Lisbon?!? The impression I get is that at some point someone thought "why not add a couple of cameras to the budget?? Maybe we can squeeze 'the newest Serra' out of it as well!"
[6]
excerpt from an upcoming essay in Fireflies:
Serra’s film [The Death of Louis XIV] participates in a new kind of narrative temporality, the time of absolute futility. In a speech act characterised by a kind of divided irony – fully intended by Serra, but not by the character himself – the king’s chief physician Fagon (Patrick D’Assumcao) concludes The Death of Louis XIV by remarking on the team’s collective failure: “Gentlemen, we’ll do better next time.”
As for Serra, he did something rather extraordinary for his “next time”. His latest film, Roi Soleil, represents a re-engagement with the Louis XIV theme, a postscript or even a remix, if you like. However, where The Death of Louis XIV is Serra’s…
آلبرت سرا در تجربه‌ی تازه‌اش، در ادامه اثر درخشان قبلی «مرگ لویی چهاردهم» (۲۰۱۶) این‌بار در یک اجرا در گالری براندائو لیسبون شاید تنها راه جنگیدن با سیطره‌ی «ملال» بر زندگی انسان را در خیرگیِ مدام به آن می‌داند: به اشتراک گذاشتن فهم کشدار بودن «زمان»، و به حضور بی‌پایان در «مکانی» که درونش انتظار هیچ اتفاقی نیست؛ شیوه‌ای غرق شدن در جهان درونی خود و اینجا لویی چهاردهمِ جوان، و رها در ناب‌ترین حالت‌اش! اینگونه تماشا کردن به کنشی فعال بدل می‌شود: به رفتاری برای درک ملال انسان.
For most of the film we watch Lluís Serrat moaning, eating chocolates, watching himself in the mirror, and, most bizarrely, drinking from himself. It’s an exaggerated, perhaps satirical, portrayal of the death of Louis XIV, a narcissistic hedonist brought to his knees by death. One immediately assumes the falseness of everything due to the intense red lighting, as well as an intertextual relationship with Serra’s former film on the matter, but by the end of this picture there’s a sudden shift which exposes the nature of film as a contrivance and the whole affair as a performance
If La mort de Louis XIV was Serra's most "mainstream" film, then I suppose it's only fitting to follow his winking promise to do better next time with a king rolling around in agony in an art gallery for an hour.
Catalan director Albert Serra’s follow-up to his magisterial The Death of Louis XIV (NYFF54) is another forensic documentation of the Sun King’s final breaths. Here, however, Versailles is replaced with the glow of the gallery. Featuring Lluís Serrat (Sancho from Serra’s Honor of the Knights) in a filmed performance of a 2017 installation, Roi Soleil boldly crossbreeds performance art and observational cinema. As we watch the King writhe and moan—sometimes painfully, sometimes humorously—in mortal agony, his prone body bathed in bloodred fluorescents, the spectator’s role is increasingly called into question, implicating the viewer in the public consumption of this very private experience.
