The King Directed by David Michôd
The King
Directed by David Michôd
Starring: Robert Pattinson, Timothée Chalamet, Tara Fitzgerald, Ben Mendelsohn, Joel Edgerton, Lily-Rose Depp, Thomasin McKenzie, Sean Harris, Dean-Charles Chapman, Tom Glynn-Carney, Andrew Havill, Ivan Kaye, Thibault de Montalembert
Provenienza: UK, Ungheria, Australia
Anno 2019
Autore recensione: Roberto Matteucci
Click Here for Italian Version
"Hey, you are wasting good wine."
William Shakespeare wrote dramas about the English kings Henry IV and Henry V, father and son. They reigned from 1399 to 1422. They were tumultuous times. Shakespeare, between the two sovereigns, created a connection, a historically non-existent figure. He is Sir John Falstaff. He emerges in the play. He is friendly, rough drunkard, of easy virtue, accustomed to the taverns, but he is also a brave warrior. The consequence is a dominant character, he has both the passions of the men of the street, both the noble spirit and funny and amusing attitude. Thus, in the drama Henry IV, prince Hal mocks him for his fondness for wine: "Thou art so fat-witted with drinking of old sack, and unbuttoning thee after supper, and sleeping upon benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten to demand that truly which thou wouldst truly know. What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day? I was no reason why thou shouldst, I was no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of the day." (1)
There is love between prince Hal and Falstaff, Shakespeare: "A thousand pound, Hal? A million. Thy love is worth a million; thou owest me thy love." (2) The prince repudiated his father Henry IV and replaced him with an idealized dad: Falstaff. Prince Hal seeks a detachment from his vices. Nothing be frightened, it is the normal hatred between father and son; Sigmund Freud teaches us: ... "Simultaneously with the overcoming and rejection of these distinctly incestuous phantasies there occurs one of the most important as well as one of the most painful psychic accomplishments of puberty; it is the breaking away from the parental authority, through which alone is formed that opposition between the new and old generations which is so important for cultural progress." (3)
The English Middle Ages are an inexhaustible source for cinema; a period of wars, conflicts, court intrigues, sovereigns with the grim character, strong queens and many hot episodes.
History is old affair, no one can change it. It is possible to amend directors, actors but the script is unchangeable. To avoid boring repetitions, the authors must use fantasy, imaginatively rework the protagonists and falsify the past.
The director David Michô, the screenwriter and actor Joel Edgerton, and the actors Robert Pattinson and Timothée Chalamet unite themselves to create an artistic mix feelings such as the relationship between father and son, the Falstaff's humour, the exciting battle in the mud. The result is the film The King presented at the 76th Venice Film Festival.
The film starts in the battlefield with a ground-level-shot after a clash. It is evening. Hundreds of corpes are on the ground, near many mourned injured. The winners walk around the field picking up the spoils. Middle-shot: "Scotland is there" and the prince kills a suffering dying man. It is the battle of Homildon Hill.
However, The King is not a chronicle of that time.
The author Joel Edgerton talk about his version: "... take those stories of that man in his evolution of becoming king, take the true story, take some personality of Shakespeare's plays, take some by history and then take something of our ideas." (4)
David Michôd has the same concept but uses different words: "in the beginning we decided to separate ourselves from the play, better, we started with the play, but we did a lot of strange things, we did a lot of research, what I really like when I make a film, then we invented a lot of things ... I honestly can't remember what is real what comes from Shakespeare what we invented ...” (5)
The film joints the authoritative history of the books, with some characters of Shakespeare (fiction, but high qualified), then the scriptwriters insert: "something of our ideas" or "we invented a lot of things". Everything is so plausible to cause amnesia, even the director has a lapse of memory: "what is real what comes from Shakespeare what we invented."
The King is a fake movie. And it is not a defect. It is the same as fake news. They are colossal lies and yet people wish they are true.
The three structural lines have already been outlined: love-hate, the separation between the prince and the sovereign; the idealization as Falstaff's father.
Therefore, Henry IV is pride, haughty, contemptuous, after all, he is the monarch. He is essentially envious. King Henry IV is not crazy but arrogant, conceited and treats his son superficially as if he were an subject.
Prince Hal, future Henry V, would never confirm it, but he is very similar to his parent. He is also proud. Snubs the rules and laws. He fights against greed, but he will become too. He is irascible but apparently fair and calms: he resolves his enormous error with a gesture of anger. He has lost both fathers but inside has a deep sense of guilt.
The link between the two kings is Falstaff. It is lustful, sensual, carnally physical, attached to goods, besides he always shows his tendency towards from gluttony, from greedy, from torpor, from melancholy. Fortunately, he also has tenacious qualities, such as courage, the strong feeling for the prince, the strength, the extravagantly but mostly he is funny.
The conclusion is history, so it is immutable. Not even dominance struggles, conflicts, politics as corruption and enrichment methods can be changed. The king sits down and faces the chief advisor William. The councilor is standing on a chair: "stay up there". The camera does not respect the power relations, and the king is filmed downwards while the councilor upwards. The councillor screams "This is how peace is made, with victory" and Henry V also the same behaves, he achieves the victory shocking the astonished pageboy who was assisting the punishment.
A similar sequence is the cutting of the head of a conspirator. Long-shot in a castle courtyard. On one side the king, in profile, sitting. In front there is a scaffold, the condemned is standing. Even here the camera reverses the authority. The head of the terrified condemned falls and the camera zooms to the sovereign.
The love-hate between Henry IV and his descendant appears when the king is in the bed seriously ill. Firstly, prince Hal has a disgusted look, but after his death, he quickly turns into a desperate cry.
Falstaff's irony emerges with the stupid and wrong war plans of the English commanders. He yawns while they were talking, then humiliating them. He accepts his responsibility and his role in front of that silly officers.
The Archbishop of Canterbury Andrew Havill looks different of a man of God, he is overbearing, despicable. He follows the army, transported on a litter. All soldiers march while he has a grotesquely awkwardly swinging sedan chair: the symbol of a church near the supremacy.
The French dauphin, heir to the king of France, is ridiculous in his lascivious blond hair, the opposite of Henry V.
There is even the solitude of the monarch: "a king has no friends" shouts his friend Falstaff. In fact, he discovers the truth only from her shrewd but honest French betrothed.
The battle of Agincourt is on October 25, 1415, in France. The English army is in numerical inferiority. To help Henry V was the mud, so much mud: "It was raining for two weeks and the recent plow land, on which the battle took place, it was a sea of thick mud." The French knights had to march through it in full plate armor, leaving them already overcome with fatigue before they had even advanced against the English. … The narrowness of the field forced the French troops into a suffocating formation, churning up even more mud into the water and the field of making them easier targets for the English longbowmen." (6)
It is the chronic of the battle, English troops have an advantage in the marsh against the heavy armours of the French. The idea is to narrate it as a sex game, a mud wrestling. Actually, the slime helped Henry IV but it was not the only reason nor the most important in the victory.
Close-up on the helmet of the crusades, long-shot on the battlefield. Filmed in the mud, there are the kings and especially Falstaff, commander of the advance guard. creator, for the authors, of the war strategy. It is a false because Fastaff does not exist in books.
The film maintains a double line of thought, the same dichotomies of the story.
One is chiaroscuro. It is a must for the dark interiors of the castles and the taverns.
The other is in the bright variations of colour as the red of the inflamed projectiles thrown by the catapults during the siege.
However, it is the candid colours, like white, light grey that dominate the final battle. A beautiful choral scene. It is the definitive moment. It is the passage from the prince's adolescence to maturity. The consequence: the immaculate armour gets dirty and changes colour in the quagmire in which they fight. Aerial-shot, a framing shows Falstaff in the centre while a multitude of soldiers crushed him. Falstaff is special, he looks up, he is the only one without the helmet. The fighters in the mud are the same, it is impossible to distinguish the English from the French. The only recognizable one is Falstaff. He is the hero!
WilliamWilliam Shakespeare, Henry IV (Part I-II), RCS Libri, Milan, May 2002, 1st edition
William Shakespeare, Henry IV (Part I-II), RCS Libri, Milan, May 2002, 1st edition
Sigmund Freud, Three essays on sexual theory, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin, 1st edition 1975, Reprint May 2010
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/8648068/Battle-of-Agincourt-ten-reasons-why-the-French-lost.html