The feature films of Gérard Corbiau — The Music Teacher and the successful Farinelli il Castrato, particularly — show a deep interest in music and the way it parallels human ambitions and emotions.
His new film, The King Is Dancing (Le Roi Danse) is set in the 17th century. It focuses on music and dance at the court of King Louis XIV of France, who came to be known as the Sun King, and Louis’s relationship with the playwright Molière and the court composer Jean-Baptiste Lully.
The narrative is framed by a dying Lully deliriously recalling his past. He is dying because he has stabbed himself in the foot with his conducting staff and now he’s got blood poisoning — and, yes, that really happened. That’s how he died. The rest of what happens in the film feels like something of a cadenza improvised around historical fact.
Lully (Boris Terral) becomes a favourite of the young King Louis (Emil Tarding, at this stage, but he will grow up to be Benoît Magimel) while the monarch is still a teenager. Lully keeps him busy and entertained, providing the soundtrack to the king’s dancing exhibitions, while the kingdom is run by his mother and Cardinal Mazarin. But as Louis grows up and begins to take the reins of power more firmly into his own hands, Lully keeps providing the soundtrack — using music, dance and spectacular theatre as a kind of propaganda, helping to convince Louis of his own majesty and bolster his burgeoning power, as well as adding to the visual extravaganza that was so important to Louis’s monarchy.
This is interesting because the Sun King’s reign was marked especially by this spectacle of power: he was a king on show, the epitome of an absolute monarch whose very being embodied the state (“L’état, c’est moi“) and whose material magnificence was part of his claim to near-divinity. He didn’t only build wonders such as the vast and dazzling palace of Versailles, showing off in ways that entrenched his status outside the court — just getting up in the morning and getting dressed was a theatrical occasion for his courtiers.
Corbiau makes the idea of power as performance abundantly clear, mostly through the sheer luxuriant spectacle of the movie itself — its sets and costumes are gorgeous on a grand scale. For the rest of it, though, it’s a bit fudgy. Anyone who has seen La Reine Margot, and got a whiff of what the machinations of French politics of that era (roughly) must have been like, will find The King Is Dancing a little bloodless.
Yet it is filled with surging passions, such as Lully’s love for the king — not a purely disinterested one, of course. The way Terral tosses his mane of black curls about, and glowers at him with his large dark eyes, hints at more than just political ambitions.
The film really comes to life when Molière (Tchéky Karyo) is on the scene, bonding or feuding with Lully, acting as the king’s ideological stalking horse, or taking the rap for his jabs at the conservative religious aristocracy. Karyo’s status as a cinematic veteran rather shows up Terral’s sometimes callow and over-the-top style.
It is all pretty entertaining, though, and of course wonderful to look at. It might help, however, if some background is sketched in. The politics are clear in their very broad strokes, but I had to look Lully up. He was an Italian later naturalised (and ennobled) by Louis; he is described in one music guide as “prolific, brilliant, ambitious and cunning”. He is also credited with bringing Italian and French operatic styles closer together, as well as breaking down the barriers between recitative and aria. The recitative is the less dramatic and melodic part, echoing ordinary speech, that keeps the opera’s plot moving along. You know what an aria is.
In The King Is Dancing, Corbiau leaps from one scene to the next, without much bridging or build-up, and keeps the emotional temperature high. He all but dispenses with the recitative; the film is all arias.