The King is Alive | Kristian Levring, 2000
In his piece written for the Chicago Sun-Times, film critic Roger Ebert compares Kristian Levring’s The King is Alive to such memorable tales as William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. While not quite as innocent or savage as the former, nor as political or thrilling as the latter, The King is Alive indeed takes on and gives new life to this idea of a group of people, stranded, who are forced to come together in order to survive. The site of our group’s struggle is not upon an endless blue ocean, however, but in the middle of the desert: the Namibian desert, to be precise, in an abandoned diamond mining town known as Kolmanskop. Left to the desert winds in 1956 after crippling post-war decline, Kolmanskop has recently taken the curious status of a tourist location and had already been featured in one or two motion pictures before being used here. The King is Alive was the fourth Dogme 95 film – the fourth of the four founding filmmakers – and the first shot outside Denmark. Unlike these earlier Dogme efforts that were an all-Danish affair, The King is Alive boasts an international cast made up of American, British and French actors, who together play a coach-load of squabbling tourists that are forced to cross the desert rather than fly over it. Of course, the coach doesn’t quite make it to its desired location and the group must come to terms with the fact that they not only are stranded in a godforsaken place but that nobody knows where they are – including themselves. Marooned and bickering, the group are encouraged by an Englishman named Henry (David Bradley, who later found some fame playing Argus Filch in the Harry Potter series) to stage a rough version of Shakespeare’s King Lear.
An important theme that can be found throughout the Dogme movement is this idea of different people being put in the same place and then made to interact. The King is Alive presents a slightly more theatrical – even Shakespearean – version of this, but an important one nonetheless, where our characters share a common and unenviable position. Unlike the dysfunctional family meltdown found in Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen (Dogme #1) and the confused faction-bondage of Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (Dogme #2) this is disintegration on a different scale. All the characters are in the same boat, but will they come together for warmth or throw each other out of it? The only other passenger in this boat, or abandoned town, is an old African who watches the group impassively from under his crinkled brow. The man, who seems to spend his days sitting still enough to become part of the scenery itself, is a conscious and important addition by Levring. Not only does the group’s ignoring of this man help illustrate the self-absorbed nature of today’s society (perhaps, if he was considered for a moment, he could lead them to safety) we also later come to resemble him as impartial onlookers, silently judging these newcomers as their newfound companionship is so violently tested. Ultimately the group’s callow new bonds are eroded, just like the ancient desert sand upon which they walk, talk, and copulate. While The King is Alive doesn’t quite come to represent Shakespeare’s tragedy (as I was led to believe beforehand), there are certainly some parallels to be found among the characters and their relationships. It is more an homage of sorts, and one that stands on its own as an important addition to the Dogme movement.
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