The charitable thing would be to pretend the Dogme 95 “Vow of Chastity” was a joke. Devised by Lars von Trier and three other Danish directors in the declared aim of “truth,” this set of rules for filmmaking includes such provisions as a ban on props and sets, a ban on “special lighting,” and the requirement that films be in color. How observing these rules will bring cinema closer to truth is incomprehensible. Yet Dogme 95 has been discussed as if it were some kind of breakthrough.
The rules are arbitrary but not arbitrary enough. If Dogme 95 had insane stipulations like “If the camera pans more than 40 degrees, an actor who was in a Cassavetes film must appear” or “Ethnic stereotypes are acceptable only in the first 20 minutes” or “If a dog walks into the shot, the actors have to pet it,” it might be worthy of respect. But the rules are tied to simplistic notions of screen realism and a rich person’s sense of what constitutes poverty of means (Rule 9: “The film format must be Academy 35mm”).
The fourth film to be certified for conformity to these rules is Kristian Levring’s The King Is Alive. Levring, one of the four original signers of the Vow of Chastity, is the last to see his Dogme 95 film in release — after Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration), Trier (The Idiots), and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen (Mifune).
Describing the premise of The King Is Alive can only make the film sound better and more absurdist than it is. When their bus goes off course because of a defective compass and runs out of gas, a group of Americans and Europeans traveling through the Namibian desert get stranded at a deserted mining town. While waiting to see whether their supply of canned carrots will run out before help arrives, they all decide to take part in a production of King Lear, which one of the group has transcribed from memory.
The film does nothing with the Lear idea, which is like the Dogme 95 rules themselves: arbitrary but not arbitrary enough. Lear is a logical choice of text for Dogme 95 — the Dogme people might say, with Gloucester: “Our means secure us, and our mere defects/Prove our commodities.” But Levring is not interested in Shakespeare’s play or in the parallels between its characters and his. The Lear production is just a device to give his underwritten zombies enough things to say and do to fill out a feature-length movie.
When not rehearsing Lear, these people spend their time embarrassing themselves and being as annoying as possible. Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character has sex with a much older man she detests in order to get him to play Gloucester. To piss off her white husband, a white woman tries to seduce the African bus driver. In the last third of the film, people we don’t care about make boring discoveries about one another (“I always knew you were nothing special” — “I never knew you were a pig”). All the actors are wasted, especially Romane Bohringer and Bruce Davison, who are both too good for the little they have to do here.
Sometimes the film (shot on digital video and transferred to 35mm) creates an interesting approximation of early color Xerox, with oversaturated greens and reds bleeding over desert yellow and with shadows etching deep lines in metallic skin. It’s too bad Levring, whose background is in TV commercials, likes to shoot scenes coffee-commercial style, with frenzied editing and brain-dead handheld coverage of the simplest event from all possible angles.
How Dogme is The King Is Alive? The split-second flashbacks and the silly lengthier shots in which an indigenous observer narrates the story in the past tense probably violate Rule 7 of the Vow (“Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden”). Rule 6 says, “The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc., must not occur.)” Does a fight scene count as non-superficial if it’s filmed through flames so that you can’t tell what’s going on? The regulation most flagrantly violated is Rule 8 — “Genre movies are not acceptable.” The King Is Alive obviously belongs to both the “group-stranded-in-remote-area” genre and the “let’s-put-on-a-Shakespeare-play” subgenre. It’s not even the first attempt to cross-breed the two species, as Levring would have known if he’d seen the Gilligan’s Island episode in which the castaways do Hamlet. Come to think of it, a Dogme 95 version of Gilligan’s Island has possibilities, though I wouldn’t trust Levring with them.
