Luis XIV, el rey sol

This movie focuses on one side of Louis the fourteenth's reign:the patron Sun King.All the best artists who were living at the time were working for the King,from the painters to the musicians to the chefs (see "Vatel" whom Louis stole from Fouquet).

Although a lot of famous historic characters appear (Colbert,Louvois,La Vallière,Maintenon),only five emerge :the threesome KIng/Lulli/Molière and ,at the beginning, two silhouettes ,the Queen mother,Anne d'Autriche ,and the king's cousin,Conti.

The king,played with talent by Benoit Magimel,who shows himself a first-class dancer ,is not exactly the king we find in history books:okay,he rules alone,but a lot of time is given over to arts ..in the first part of his reign,the king was first a soldier :the fine arts connoisseur came only second.(music,dance,gardens...).

Lulli (or Lully depending on whom you ask)was an Italian,so it's very surprising -and it's the main flaw of the whole film- he speaks without the slightest accent.Of course,and probably because c'est à la mode,the director doesn't pass over Lully's homosexuality but he does not lay great stress on it,preferring to give music more than its due:Lully's was majestic and magnificent,the KIng Music par excellence.

Tcheky Kario shines as Molière and gives what will probably be his lifetime role.A jaded and coughing actor/playwright/director whose genius was still brilliant,he had to cope with sanctimonious persons (les dévôts de la compagnie du Saint-Sacrement)and leter with Lully's jealousy.

The last Lully -Molière collaboration,"le bourgeois gentilhomme" (arguably Molière's funniest work),made Molière a visionary who was beginning to see theater as a complete show .The Turkish ceremony " in "le bourgeois gentilhomme" and its celebrated menuet (sadly not included in the film) were forerunners of the musicals.But Lully,who played the "Mufti" in the play ,felt like a buffoon and feared that the king might favor Molière over him.

Lully wanted to be a king and" a king ain't satisfied till he owns everything "as Bruce Springsteen sings ,so the dancer became a wolf .Molière was not his one victim :he actually put down all his rivals and had a complete stranglehold on the king's music.

Some users complain about Courbiau's baroque style:since at least one third of the time is dedicated to arts ,what's the point of being realist and austere ?We're not dealing with Rossellini directing "la prise du pouvoir par LOuis XIV",dash it! Okay ,some sequences are ponderous -Molière's death on stage while playing "le malade imaginaire" did not need this dancers dressed up as skeletons,for instance.But if cinema means change of scenery,"le roi danse" pulls it off with gusto.

Just arrived home from a jump into the 17th century at the royal court of Louis XIV. This film gives you an excellent inside look of one of the most protectors of the arts. You may find the story a bit thin, but the images are very carefully chosen and composed. It's not an ordinary costume show and happily made under the supervision of culture historians. Maybe the music does sound a bit the same during the film, but it also let you hear some magnificent moments. I enjoyed this movie very well because of the richness of the photography and the well balanced cast. I recommand this film to those who love western culture during one of the highest levels, the baroque.

I just saw the movie during a French art and culture festival in Hong Kong. It was the answer to my quest for a movie that deals with the subject of King Louis XIV's passion for dance and that of Lully's influence in the king's life. (I had previously seen half a dozen movies dealing with the subject of Louis XIV but NONE even touched on the fact that he loved dancing.) I was thrilled by what I saw, especially "Le Ballet de la Nuit" performance in which the 14-year-old king was dressed in the fashion of Apollo and danced a majestic dance. I am surprised none of the comments mentioned anything about the choreography.

I had the fortune of meeting the choreographer of the film, Béatrice Massin, who attended the screening. She is THE authority of Baroque dance in France, after having worked with Francine Lancelot, who was the pioneer in the restoration of Baroque dance into its original form. Massin works with original dance notation materials from Louis XIV's time, especially the Feuillet notations, which provided very detailed and exact instructions on the dance steps used at Louis XIV's court. This dance form is very important because it is the origin of today's ballet, which has gone through a lot of transformations, especially from that of a male-only art form to one where the female dancer dominates the stage.

During production, Massin worked with the lead roles in the movie every day for three months, and she has high regard for Benoît Magimel. Though not a professional dancer, he attempted all the dance sequences with courage, never uttering the words "I can't." Of course, the repertoire of Baroque dance was wide-ranging and Massin could not possibly have included all the varieties of that era. She mainly worked in such a way to show what the director wanted. In the context of this movie, the director had wanted to show the masculine power that the king wanted to demonstrate, as a way to consolidate his power on the throne. So what we see in the movie comes across as very forceful, masculine movements.

One thing that the film has left out - what Massin feels as a mistake - is the character of Pierre Beauchamps. Beauchamps was the key dance master at Louis XIV's court and was responsible for dance education and choreographer, although he was also a musician - not as accomplished as Lully at that, while Lully's dancing skills would pale alongside Beauchamps'. In fact, Lully, Beauchamps and Molière were working very closely together. For me, it is a big, big regret that this movie, whose theme is Louis XIV's passion and talent for dance, has treated Beauchamps in such a dismissive manner (the only scene where he appeared was when the king asked him to leave the room and rearrange the choreography, to give it "more air!").

Another thing that I miss seeing is the establishment of l'Académie Royale de la Dance. Surely, the film shows that the king announced it in a royal decree as soon as he took over all the power upon Mazarin's death. But it would have been nice to see a snippet of the academy's activities, such as how the first group of professional ballet dancers were trained.

Unlike what some of the commentators here have said, though, I think that the film does have a deep aspect. The idea that Louis XIV cared so much about the art of dance and music and Lully's concept of music being something to make the king immortal -- points to the transcending nature of these arts. Although dance and music was used as much as a political tool for power as a form of entertainment at the court, I personally feel that the passion for dance and music - as a pure form of truth and beauty - is powerfully expressed through the dramatic performances of the actors and actresses in this film.

Anybody who loves the subject of Louis XIV, Baroque music, dance and ballet should go and see this film.

The movie misses a better plot, it deserves a better plot when shooting at the Versailles and dealing with Louis XIV. Not that it is bad, just don't expect too much. The costumes, the location, the music, the historical facts, it all seems to be present, but the director just didn't make good use of it. It is an entertaining movie for those who like costume-dramas though, be not mistaken. I had expected it to be better. The characters are well drawn, the actors are good enough, especially the Queen and the Dance Master. The director did not fear the use of some explicit body-language, something that I applaud, it fits well in this landscape of courtly love.

Another reviewer was mistaken when he wrote, "In order to understand the movie, one has to be quite familiar with French history ...." While it wouldn't hurt to know everybody's back story, it is NOT essential to appreciating this movie. Before I watched it, I had never heard of Lully or Cambert or Anne of Austria; I had heard of Molière and Conti but knew nothing about them except their names; but I had no trouble at all following the movie and enjoying it as much as I could with its substantial flaws.

The same reviewer complained that the actors playing Molière, Conti and Cambert were much too old, that all three were closer to Louis' age. What bothered me more than the wrong ages of some of the supporting characters was the fabulous gorgeousness of the actors who played Louis and Lully. Please! There are good portraits of both men, and both of them were as homely as my aunt Gertrude - especially Louis.

That a man who looked like a gargoyle dwarf (he was only a few inches over five feet tall), saddled at the age of four with a bankrupt, strife-torn, second-rate country, transformed himself into the Sun King and his country into a major world power, and by the force of his will completely dominated Western civilization for nearly a century - and STILL, more than 300 years later, and despite the horrific revolution that destroyed the world he created, is the single most significant person in the history of France (only Napoleon comes close, and he was a flash in the pan compared to Louis) - is a big part of what makes him so extraordinary. If he had looked like Benoît Magimel, what would be the big deal? Gorgeous people automatically control the world; they don't have to DO anything. Louis is fascinating because he was NOT gorgeous, and making him gorgeous wipes out 75% of what makes him interesting.

The answer to both that reviewer's and my beefs with this movie is that its makers had no intention of making an historically accurate quasi-documentary about this fascinating man and the almost equally fascinating people around him. They intended to make an overblown, potboiler soap opera based loosely on real people. They made the principals gorgeous because who cares what happens to ugly people? They made the villains grotesque and old because if they had been young we might not have known they were the villains.

This is a French movie, but it might as well have been made in Hollywood. It is cheap (and I'm not talking about money) melodrama, with gorgeous, dashing heroes and old, ugly, hunched-over, troll-like villains with grotesque birthmarks on their faces. It was NOT made for experts in French history or any other persons of intelligence and discernment.

It was made for an audience that neither knows nor cares how accurate it is or who the people in it are. That's how Hollywood does everything, by formula - the same formula they used in silent westerns, where you knew the good from the bad guys by the color of their hats - so audiences don't have to think, don't have to understand anything. They know by their looks which characters to cheer and which ones to boo, and that's all that matters.