The Sun King Louis XIV - a parade role for Truffaut icon Jean-Pierre Léaud - suddenly feels pain in his leg after a walk in August 1715. He spends the next few days in his chamber, carrying on the business of government as best he can, and gradually slides toward his death. A historical film as a chamber play, opulence in a confined space, the dance of death of a bedridden man - while around the sick man the future without him is already being tinkered with as eagerly as jealously. "In a sequence of courtly ceremonies, everyday tasks, small pleasures and great pains, the unique Jean-Pierre Léaud plays, almost without any gestures or facial expressions, the simultaneously comical and harrowing encounter of a human being with death. A cinema entirely of this world. And as if from another star." (Viennale)
A mesmerizing elegy on the dying of the absolutist ruler Louis XIV.
The Sun King Louis XIV - a parade role for Truffaut icon Jean-Pierre Léaud - suddenly feels pain in his leg after a walk in August 1715. He spends the next few days in his chamber, carrying on the business of government as best he can, and gradually slides toward his death.
A historical film as a chamber play, opulence in a confined space, the dance of death of a bedridden man - while around the sick man the future without him is already being tinkered with as eagerly as jealously.
"In a sequence of courtly ceremonies, everyday tasks, small pleasures and great pains, the unique Jean-Pierre Léaud plays, almost without any gestures or facial expressions, the simultaneously comical and harrowing encounter of a human being with death. A cinema entirely of this world. And as if from another star." (Viennale)