The Sun King (Jean-Pierre Léaud) offers advice to the Dauphin (Francis Montaulard) in THE DEATH OF LOUIS XIV

THE DEATH OF LOUIS XIV (LA MORT DE LOUIS XIV) (Albert Serra, 2016)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, Howard Gilman Theater
144 West 65th St. between Eighth & Amsterdam Aves.
Opens Friday, March 31
Series continues through April 6
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org
www.cinemaguild.com

Albert Serra’s The Death of Louis XIV is the crowning achievement of Jean-Pierre Léaud’s majestic sixty-year career. Léaud first came to prominence in the late 1950s and 1960s, starring in François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel films (The 400 Blows, Stolen Kisses) and classics by Jean-Luc Godard (Masculin Féminin, Made in U.S.A.). In The Death of Louis XIV, we get to watch the seventy-two-year-old actor play a character dying, very slowly, portraying the last three and a half weeks of the Sun King’s life, the end of a seventy-two-year reign, the longest in French history. Based on actual accounts of the king’s death, including the memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon and Philippe de Courcillon de Dangeau, the film takes place primarily in Louis XIV’s bedchamber, where he is watched over by his valet (Marc Susini as Blouin), doctors (Patrick d’Assumçao as Fagon, Bernard Belin as Mareschal), and priests (Jacques Henric as Father Le Tellier, Philippe Dion as Cardinal de Rohan) and visited by sycophantic but concerned courtiers. Wearing a spectacular wig that makes him look like an elderly Max from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, the king lies on his back, seldom speaking or moving, as he is poked and prodded and fed and the doctors consider amputating his infected leg. He gets polite applause when he swallows a bite of egg. A possible charlatan (Vicenç Altaió as Le Brun) gives him a supposedly magic elixir. He proffers advice to his grandson, Louis, Duke of Orléans (Francis Montaulard), who is destined to succeed him. Desperate to maintain his dignity, the king is soon as helpless as a newborn baby, dribbling as the end nears.

Doctors examine Louis XIVs gangrenous leg at Versailles in gorgeous, dark film by Albert Serra

The Death of Louis XIV was initially commissioned as a live installation for the Centre Pompidou, where Léaud would perform the Sun King’s death on a bed in a glass case over fifteen days. When that project was canceled for budgetary reasons, the actor and Serra, the Catalonian director who has previously made Honor of the Knights, about Don Quixote, Birdsong, about the three kings and the magi, and Story of My Death, about Casanova and Dracula, decided to turn it into a film, maintaining a similar claustrophobic feel. It’s photographed in almost agonizing detail by cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg using three cameras, so the actors, especially Léaud, never know which one to play to, adding a realistic element to the extraordinarily slow-moving proceedings, along with natural light and sound. Serra, who wrote the script with Thierry Lounas, and Ricquebourg favor long, dark close-ups from a motionless camera, each frame composed like a Caravaggio painting, although the director holds that was not his intention, claiming a more random and guerrilla-style approach. Léaud acts primarily with his face, using his narrow lips, heavy eyes, and every craggy line to show the once-proud monarch’s growing misery and fear as he withers away; one remarkable scene lasts more than four minutes without a cut, a mesmerizing tour de force of elegant simplicity. The film features gorgeous costumes by Nina Avramovic, fabulous hairstyling by Antoine Mancini, and stunning production design by Sebastian Vogler, bathed in alluringly shadowy reds, while editors Ariadna Ribas, Artur Tort, and Serra work their magic, transforming the three-camera shoot into a powerful, seamless narrative. It’s a darkly somber film that will get deep under your skin, a bravura baroque chamber opera led by a career performance by one of the world’s greatest actors. The Death of Louis XIV opens March 31 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in conjunction with the series “Jean-Pierre Léaud, from Antoine Doinel to Louis XIV,” which runs through April 6 and includes such films as Godard’s La Chinoise, Philippe Garrel’s La Concentration, Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore, Jacques Rivette’s Out 1: Spectre, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Porcile, and numerous Truffaut works.