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If you like your movies boiled down to single-line sales pitches, then strap this one on for size: "Dogme95 in the desert, stranded travellers reciting Shakespeare". Such is Kristian Levring's Dogme#4: The King is Alive. Released in the UK early next year, it's the latest effort from the Danish collective consecrated to the making of simpler, more truthful films under a 10-point "vow of chastity". It concerns a motley bunch of tourists whose coach runs out of gas in the hot, arid heart of Namibia - at which point one of their number, a retired actor, proposes that they raise their spirits by rehearsing a version of King Lear that he has transcribed from memory. Not, perhaps, how you or I would handle that particular predicament, but as old Lear himself would say, "O reason not the need!"
Blessed with top-drawer performances from Janet McTeer and Jennifer Jason Leigh, The King is Alive is a wonderfully lunatic and literate tragicomedy, serving further evidence of the sort of edgy, uncompromising cinema Dogme95 has championed. Nevertheless, its critical reception at Cannes last May was tinged with fatigue. As Levring's effort rounded out a quartet of Dogme films by the four founding "Brothers", some felt that the novelty had worn thin. Kristian Levring half-agrees with that reading. "Yeah, you can say that as a statement it's probably completed. But now they're making a whole shit-load of Dogme films, and I'm sure some good will come of it."
Certainly Dogme95 is still making waves. Though the Brothers have clearly moved on (Lars von Trier to his preposterous Bjork musical, Thomas Vinterberg to It's All About Love, a $10m romance set in the US), the stripped-down aesthetic proposed by the original manifesto remains widely aped: from Fourth Estate's compendium of short fiction All Hail the New Puritans, to Channel Four's late-night short film strand Dogma TV. Meanwhile, the Copenhagen-based Dogme95...