Perhaps not the best Roberto Rossellini to start with. A stuffy and boring biopic on King Louis XIV with no real dramatic arc to speak of. But the greatest problem is in Jean-Marie Patte’s Louis XIV. He reads lines like he was a high school jock that got forced into the school play because he was the only guy in the vicinity. With an adroit director (like Wes Anderson, who put this movie in his top 10 for my Criterion Challenge 2021 list), and put into a comedy, it could have worked, but in a straight historical drama, it was nearly deadly.
Perhaps not the best Roberto Rossellini to start with. A stuffy and boring biopic on King Louis XIV with no real dramatic arc to speak of. But the greatest problem is in Jean-Marie Patte’s Louis XIV. He reads lines like he was a high school jock that got forced into the school play because he was the only guy in the vicinity. With an adroit director (like Wes Anderson, who put this movie in his top 10 for my Criterion Challenge 2021 list), and put into a comedy, it could have worked, but in a straight historical drama, it was nearly deadly.
