ROI SOLEIL

Albert Serra
Once again, after the masterpiece The Death of Louis XIV, with Jean-Pierre Léaud, we get to witness in Roi Soleil the death of the famous King, only this time as the declared form of a show about itself: about art, the end of it, and its latest ends. A film-performance, a little bit more literal than the others, because the death of Louis XIV (Lluís Serrat, his favorite actor), is filmed in period or stage costumes, inside the blood-red “white cube” of an art gallery where an audience of today’s visitors could show up anytime, by way of a court, a long way from Versailles. Ever more an iconoclast but even more a plastic artist, Serra makes us experience the ordeal, and makes the final blow sensible and physical – while all the time talking about images only. Emptying the figure once more, ruining the “figurative”, making a whole film that can be summed up in a single sentence, but without abandoning the form or neglecting the material, while keeping all of their appeal and terrors: such is Albert Serra’s post-conceptual cinema, and Roi Soleil certainly is its monochrome-like prototype. A “piece”, as they say of artists’ works, made of four walls and one body right in the middle, a film that dares summoning the worse, for our attention. Cinema as failure to assist a figure in danger. (L.C.)