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| Dunes of desert landscape and lone figures walking there make up this sparse poster for Kristian Levring's The King Is Alive |
A busload of Western tourists get stranded in Africa's Namibian desert after having driven incredible long - but in the wrong direction. They spend their time while waiting for rescue on acting out Shakespeare's King Lear.
The King Is Alive is written by Anders Thomas Jensen (Red Road (2006)) and co-writer/director Kristian Levring (Et Skud fra Hjertet (1986)), and it is the 4th film done following the Dogme95 manifesto, which limits filmmaking techniques and effects to a radical, sometimes lifelike sparseness in method and style.
The film seems bent on exhibiting the hypocrisy, hysteria and incompetence of regular Westerners, - there may be more sins in play than these I am sure, - because, of course, the masks of civilization inevitable come to crumble and fall in the meeting with the brutal, uncaring desert.
But even though The King Is Alive is well cast and well acted and seems to have the makings of something potentially great in it, it is both written and directed with too unsure hands as to what it is it expresses. The fact that all of the characters are rather distasteful doesn't make the slow-moving drama any more exciting. The King Is Alive is finally more special than good.
Related post:
Kristian Levring: The Salvation (2014) - Classic western yarn meets Danish dynamite
Watch a 23-minute video here of Levring and executive producer Vibeke Windeløv talking about the making of the film here - with English subtitles
Cost: Unknown
Box office: Uncertain, but in excess of 156k $
= Uncertain - but almost certainly a box office disaster
[The King Is Alive premiered 11 May (Cannes Film Festival, out of competition) and runs 109 minutes. 10 companies, representing 6 nations, were involved in this co-production. Shooting took place in Namibia. The film sold only 13,248 tickets in main production country Denmark, coming to approximately 139k $. In North America the film grossed 17k $ in its first week of release in 6 theaters. No other release details are released, but figuring that the film was made on a low 2 mil. $ budget, it looks like a box office disaster. It won 1/2 Robert award nominations (Denmark's Oscar). Roger Ebert gave it a 3/4 star review, translating to 2 notches higher than this one. Levring returned with D-Dag - Den Færdige Film (2001, TV movie, segment) and theatrically with The Intended (2002). Miles Anderson (The Musketeers (2015, TV-series)) returned in 10 TV credits prior to his theatrical return in The Silent Fall (2007). The King Is Alive is fresh at 60 % with a 5.96/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of The King Is Alive?
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