The King Is Alive

While shifting airports by bus in Africa, a group of passengers is driven to the middle of nowhere in the desert by the driver that is following a defective compass. They run out of gas and they reach a ghost village inhabited by a single man, Kanana (Peter Kubheka). One passenger that has experience with desert gives five advices to the others to survive in the spot, among them to keep the spirit high, while he travels through the desert seeking for help. One intellectual in the stranded group suggests the performance of King Lear to keep the morale of the survivors. Along the days, while hope decreases, the tension increases among the survivors.

"The King is Alive" is a tragedy in a tragedy, with a group of people stranded in the desert performing King Lear to keep the spirit of the survivors. The story has a breathless beginning with the driver absolutely lost and the despair of the passengers and is raw and disturbing, when the survivors return to a primitive stage of human condition. The performances are outstanding and this Dogma 85 film was released in Brazil on VHS by Cult Films Distributor. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "O Rei Está Vivo" ("The King is Alive")

The only Dogma movie at the 2000 Cannes film festival, The King is Alive is, like all Dogmas, pumped with negative energy and pessimism, yet remains strangely humorous and always entertaining. It tells the story of a bus breakdown in the North African desert, and the decent into lunacy of the already-eccentric group of passengers, who eventually decide to put on an absurd production of King Lear to pass the time.

Admittedly, the injection of Shakespeare feels like something of a stunt, and some dissenters even complained that the desert was too unfairly photogenic for the Dogma principals. But The King is Alive grows horrific on its own terms, like a sophisticated Blair Witch Project but without an evil other for them (or us) to run away from.

The offbeat cast includes Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Davison, the great David Bradley, the late Brion James, and Janet McTeer who, as a neurotic American, vulgarizes her way through a killer scene where she demands to know about her husband's taste in women.

I was inspired to write this because the other review was so dismissive of the film. The set-up may be contrived, but I found Levring's film compelling, visually inventive, richly atmospheric, and often surprising. The relationships among the characters drew me in and the performances were gripping. All told, the film provides an inspiring example of the Dogma approach to filmmaking that ventures beyond the formulaic Hollywood mold. Props to Levring and the actors!

Wow. I was speechless after seeing this movie for the first time (a feeling I still experience even after almost a dozen viewings). I've never seen such an eloquent, spellbinding, and above all logical, presnetation of King Lear. Truly the best setting for such a play is by a broken down bus in a desert.

The first thing that struck me about the film was the unsurpassed clarity of the footage. Even in dark scenes around the campfire everyone's face is perfectly in focus and the viewer feels he is with this poor unfortunate bus travelers in where ever it was they got stuck. The well placed cut aways of the lost traveler in the desert enhance the story-telling experience.

Sike, this movie sunks.

• but the movie is deader'n a doornail. It reminded me of "The Claim", another darling of some of our local newspaper critics. Both films are pretentious and dull, with no characters to care about, and nothing much to say. ("The Claim", I guess, is saying that if you sell your wife and baby, you'll feel bad about it later even if you've made a lot of money in the interim. Well, duhhh!) "The King is Alive" is apparently saying that bus drivers not only navigate by compass in the desert, but are stupid enough not to notice that their compasses haven't moved a fraction of an inch over several score miles. It is also saying people waiting around for rescue on the desert are going to get dirty, grow beards and get upset, which I already knew. What I didn't know, was that people in such situations will engage in amateur theatrics. Really? Okay, but so what?

A camera placed within five inches of the character's face may be of interest to a dermatologist, but brother, dialogue and body language reveals character, not extreme close ups.

I couldn't make it to the end of "The King is Alive". I left as soon as one of the characters, presented as thirst-crazed and exhausted before he finds the body of the would be rescuer who set off several days before, manages to stroll back to the group somehow refreshed.

Neither film maker seems to have taken to heart the concept of shot-continuity. Come on guys, you MUST have heard of it in film-making 101. Or aren't they teaching that anymore?

If this is Danish Dagme, I'll take Dagmar.