![]() Levring's experiment and of the determination of his admirable cast. ''Nothing will come of nothing,'' as old Lear said. Those who object to ''The King Is Alive'' will find it an exercise in dirty-chic nihilism. The burly, red-faced British actor David Calder is brilliant as cynical, self-deluding Charles, whose sexual transactions with Gina provide the film with its moments of greatest cruelty and rawest emotion. Jennifer Jason Leigh, as a sexually manipulative American named Gina, drops the mannerisms that sometimes make her hard to watch but retains the twitchy vulnerability that can make her impossible to turn away from. The cast, working in conditions that appear to have been only slightly less dire than those portrayed in the film, work together in a grim, convincing improvisatory rhythm. Rather, the playacting the characters engage in - reciting lines they barely understand at first - makes them paradoxically more real and helps ''The King Is Alive'' escape the melodramatic contrivances of its story. Levring's interpolation of ''Lear'' is, in context, absurd, it does not feel like a literary pretense. The film, investigating a similar question, pushes its characters to the very limits of their humanity even as it strips them to their human essence. Henry, with an amused intellectual detachment that makes him a stand-in for both the filmmaker and the audience, anticipates ''some fantastic striptease of basic human needs,'' an apt description, when you consider it, of both ''The King Is Alive'' and ''King Lear'' itself, Shakespeare's most despairing play. ![]() The juxtaposition creates a sense of loneliness and panic, a stomach-turning dread that makes the survival instinct look almost comically weak. The unsparing, invasive naturalism of digital video, which seems specially calibrated to register the play of anxiety and distress on human faces, also records an inhuman landscape of undulating dunes and blinding sky. Levring's vision of hell is vivid and stark but - thanks to that empty, endless desert - touched with a pictorial sublimity rarely attempted within the constraints of the Dogma aesthetic. The dysfunctional tourists in ''The King Is Alive,'' by contrast, offer a rich illustration of Jean-Paul Sartre's observation in ''No Exit'' that ''hell is other people.'' Not only did his tropical paradise offer a steady supply of fresh fish and produce, but also his companion was a sensible and sympathetic volleyball. Levring maroons in the Zimbabwean desert, Tom Hanks's character in ''Cast Away'' was fortunate indeed, and his problems relatively simple. In comparison with the unlucky travelers Mr. There is something morbidly fascinating about group behavior in extremis. This idea has been explored by countless first-time playwrights, to say nothing of Alfred Hitchcock in ''Lifeboat'' and the creators of ''Gilligan's Island'' and ''Survivor.'' ''The King Is Alive,'' a new film by the Danish director Kristian Levring, a Dogma 95 signer, takes off from a sturdy and irresistible premise: a group of people stranded in the middle of nowhere struggle for survival against the elements and in the process reveal some basic truths of human nature.
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