DANCE TO THE MUSIC, SING IN TEMPO

DANCE TO THE MUSIC, SING IN TEMPO

GÉRARD CORBIAU — LE ROI DANSE — 2000

Louis XIV is a teenager at the beginning of the film. The throne and the power of his title are in the hands of his mother who is using some of the most fundamentalist Catholics in the kingdom to impose a complete allegiance to the church, to the austere and secluded religious faith in which every subject of the kingdom, and the king, first of all, are supposed to respect all the rules of purity, sinlessness, and absence of all emotions, sensations, desires, and of course impulses. Every subject, and the king, first of all, are supposed to be senseless cabbages.

That’s the real drama of this teenage king who is going to climb on his throne and impose his absolute power pretty soon. As a teenager, he got acquainted, even a little bit more than acquainted since he supports them financially, with Molière for theater and Lully for music who are proposing comedies, farces, satires, as for Molière, and dance music, light and actually ballet dancing more than simple popular dancing, as if that could be popular at the court, to the King who likes it and dances himself on this music, and the court where plenty of younger noble people want to enjoy life, does the same.

But the king has two important projects. First, to build Versailles, the Versailles we know today, and second, the need to defend, assert, and reinforce his provinces with military action. It is where the film is slightly short. It does not speak of the two most noteworthy soldiers of the King’s army, Henri de Turenne and the Prince of Condé. Both will die on the battlefield and will be buried in the Saint Denis Basilica, the burying basilica of the French Kings. In the same way, the film only considers Molière and Lully, the light stage of this court. But other playwrights exist, like Pierre and Thomas Corneille, and Jean Racine, and the tragedies they write are also set to music and turned into operas with Marc-Antoine Charpentier among other composers. The film is centered too much on only Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, aka Molilère who dies nearly on the stage, and Jean-Baptiste Lully who dies a dramatic death after planting his baton into his foot and refusing, since he was a dancer, to have his leg amputated. He dies from…