Bathing in the long, slow twilight of the Sun King
THE lighting is exquisite, a long twilight dream of flickering candles against dark, richly oppressive drapery and gilded baroque ornaments.
Once, in a long silent moment, a guttering flame throws the golden reflection of a fragment of jelly on a silver spoon onto the thinning lip and sharp nose of the dying king.
He is not up to jelly now. Earlier, when he managed a spoonful of soup and a biscuit, women of the court stood in a row applauding, relieved.
We have been in the royal bedroom for more than an hour, and before that we saw him only in daylight once, outdoors in a wheeled chair.
In an early scene, already recumbent and weary, he could raise himself a little and soften his heavy features to smiles of affection for his graceful greyhounds, as they fussed and licked the sacred face of this Sun King, 72 years a monarch, a legendary symbol of old France. Since that brief, happy moment his decline has kept us both rapt and trapped, compassionate and claustrophobic.
Catalan director Albert Serra’s work is an arthouse film based on the memoirs of grandees who witnessed Louis XIV’s death from gangrene in 1715. In exquisitely framed shots, we share that last fortnight amid courtiers and doctors with their anxious murmurs and — for this was an absolute monarch — their understandable fears of dismissal and the Bastille.
It is sparse in dialogue, heavy in mood, deliberately avoiding dramatics and sentiment unless it should rise in the viewer. It does sometimes: you are forced to reflect on the way that no matter how much glory or wealth we acquire, our body will one day betray us.
You reflect, too, on medicine and how it grew: one of the few moments of levity comes when the serious regular doctors bring in a Spanish quack with an ‘elixir’ made of bulls’ sperm, frog fat and ‘brain juice distilled by the English’.
The remarkable Jean-Pierre Leaud, as Louis, hardly moves yet radiates a vast dignity of pain, despite an extraordinary curled white wig so massively exaggerated it looks as if he has a full-grown sheep stapled to each ear.
In contrast with the gangrenous rotting leg, the pomp of court is always there. The rosary in the king’s hand glitters, the wine he can barely swallow arrives in crystal goblets.
The stillness and tension of the court is echoed in the faces of Patrick d’Assumcao as the doctor and Marc Susini as the faithful valet. After the king’s death, even as they follow instructions to remove his heart to be sent to the Jesuits, there is dignity in the contemplation of death.
And in the doctor’s final words: ‘We will do better next time.’