Suggests: Harvard Film Screening: The Death of Louis XIV

In a brilliant turn of casting Albert Serra allowed Jean-Pierre Léaud to become the Sun King in the sad days of his slow, crepuscular death and to bring elements of tragicomedy to the attentive but futile rituals of the doctors, servants and sycophants fluttering around the monarch. While embodying the king who symbolically marked both the apogee and end of France as the leading European power, the charged presence of nouvelle vague legend Léaud as the dying ruler should also be taken as a retort of sorts to the tiresomely repeated mantra about the so-called “death of cinema.”

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