The king dances (film)
The King Dances (original title: Le Roi danse ) is a historical film by the Belgian director Gérard Corbiau from 2000 . Philippe Beaussant's biography of Jean-Baptiste Lully Lully ou le musicien du soleil (1992) served as a literary model .
The film tells the life and career of the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully at the court of the French King Louis XIV , his relationship with the Sun King and his collaboration with Molière .
action
Shortly before the performance of his new play, Jean-Baptiste Lully waits for the arrival of King Louis XIV. The king does not appear and Lully begins the performance in front of an empty royal armchair. With suppressed anger, he beats the beat with a long, heavy stick on the floor and hits his foot in the process. He is treated immediately, the doctors summoned want to amputate his foot, but Lully refuses, he is a dancer. In his bedside madness, he remembers his rise and fall.
Lully came to the Paris court from Florence . Although the subordinates of the king, who is dominated by Cardinal Mazarin and his mother Anna of Austria , are critical of him as an Italian, Louis XIV stands behind him. Lully fulfills the king's demands for amusement and entertainment and provides him with the music for his beloved ballets. He is also the first to give Louis XIV dance shoes with heels. In the event that he can hold himself upright in it, Louis XIV promises Lully to fulfill his greatest wish: Lully wants to become French in order to be recognized in the country.
Eight years later, Mazarin died, Louis XIV disempowered his mother and officially assumed sole rule. Like his mother, he excludes his greatest adversary, the cousin Prince de Conti, from the council that is subordinate to him. Lully meanwhile asserts himself against his musical adversary Robert Cambert , whom he also spends his lover. On the orders of the king, Lully marries Cambert's girlfriend Madeleine, who later gives him two sons. Lully's love, however, is, next to adolescent men, Louis XIV, in whom he sees a god. While inspecting the bottom of his future magnificent garden, Versailles , Louis XIV falls into a swamp. As a result, he fell so seriously ill that the doctors gave him up. His mother and de Conti are called to his side, and both prevent Lully from entering the king's apartments. Lully then plays in front of the door to the royal bedchamber, first with other musicians and later alone, until morning. Doctors at the time determine that the king has largely recovered, and Lully is considered a magician of music.
The year 1664 saw the first collaboration between Lully and Molière . Both develop the ballet comedies in a mixture of theater, dance and singing, which are a great success. While Lully is rather conservative, Molière also wants to be political with his plays and address current grievances. In response to the bigotry , which was also supported by the queen, he wrote the play Tartuffe , which the king liked, but was forbidden at the instigation of Anna of Austria. Lully, in turn, is given the murder on a bellboy by the bigots. Louis XIV forgives him, but indicates that he expects discipline from Lully. Neither of them were friends and he measured Lully's worth solely by his talent, which still kept him at court at the time.
Lully's opponent Anna of Austria died in 1666 of cancer and the consequences of a mastectomy. She wants to get Louis XIV on his deathbed to promise to change his style of government, but he does not want to lie to her. Four years later, Louis XIV, now 32 years old, wants to show difficult dance steps in a dance as embodied sun, but fails in rehearsals and stumbles during the performance, which is viewed as a bad omen. From then on, the king stopped dancing and Lully fell more and more often into depression and self-doubt. He appears as an actor in Molière's Schwänken and has the feeling that the audience is laughing at him and not his character. When his archenemy Cambert stages the first French opera, in which Madeleine's niece Julie sings the main part, Lully can force Louis XIV to grant him the sole privilege of performing French opera and orchestral performances - a final concession. Cambert is ousted, but Lully has also sacrificed his friendship with Molière, who has been ill for a long time, to his will to rise. Since all theaters are only allowed to use two singers and two instruments on stage, Molière can no longer perform ballet comedies. In addition, with the privilege, all of Molière's pieces, for which Lully wrote the music, also become the property of Lully. Molière's answer to the affront is The Conceited Sick . The king, in turn, does not look at the play, and Molière dies during a performance on the stage. Lully performs his first French opera before the king, but he cannot get any emotion out of him. His star has also fallen.
On the sickbed, Lully begins to have a fever, speaks of the dancing king and Molière. A little later he dies without the king having seen him again. Meanwhile, Louis XIV is standing at the window of Versailles Palace and looking out over the magnificent gardens. With the question “Isn't there any music playing tonight?” He leaves the hall and only the steps of his entourage echo in the room.
production
The film was shot in various locations in France (including on location in Versailles), Germany and Belgium as well as in the MMC studios in Cologne. The production design is by Hubert Pouille , the costumes created Olivier Bériot . The music was recorded by the Ensemble Musica Antiqua Köln under the direction of Reinhard Goebel and was released as a soundtrack on the Deutsche Grammophon label . Julie's singing is dubbed by Cécile Scheen in the film . The choir in the film is the Vocaal Ensemble Ex Tempore under the direction of Florian Heyerick .
The King Dances was released on December 6, 2000 in France and Belgium. The German premiere was on February 8, 2001 at the Berlinale . It was released on April 26, 2001; In 2011 it was released on DVD.
criticism
The filmdienst called The King is dancing a "opulent filmed and incisively played historical paintings, merge, in the pictures, music, dance, personal stories and political backgrounds to a frenzied choreography that captivates the senses of the spectator alike as infatuated." For 3sat was The King dances an “opulent costume and music film with stylistically extraordinary images of Baroque zest for life by Gérard Corbiau”.
“Director Gérard Corbiau shot an opulent historical music for lovers of baroque excess,” wrote Der Spiegel . The taz saw the film "between historical research and psychedelic now-time pop". In it, Lully's career “unfolds in a fever as the way down - rushed, kaleidoscopic, fragmentary and opulent; a bit dark and megalomaniac like Klaus Kinski's ' Paganini '. "
Awards
Cameraman Gérard Simon was awarded the Złota Żaba (Golden Frog) as the best cameraman for The King Dances at the Polish Plus Camerimage .
The King Dances received three César nominations in 2001 : Boris Terral was nominated for Best Young Actor, Henri Morelle was nominated for Best Sound and Olivier Bériot was nominated for Best Film Costume .
At the Belgian Joseph Plateau Awards in 2001 the film was nominated in the categories of Best Belgian Director and Best Belgian Screenplay .
Web links
- The king is dancing in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The king dances in the online film database
- The king dances on kino.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ The king is dancing. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ↑ The King is dancing on 3sat.de
- ↑ Cinema in brief: The King is dancing . In: Der Spiegel , No. 17. 2001, p. 198.
- ↑ Harald Fricke: Oiled in gold . In: taz , April 26, 2001.