MAMI Day 6: Dinesh Raheja reviews The Death Of Louis X1V & The Greasy Strangler

October 26, 2016

I saw a film on death which was painfully slow but worthwhile and a pitch-black comedy on sex and murder that was GROSS - yes I have spelt it in capitals and yet I feel haven't underlined its intentional 'crassiness' enough. Fortunately, I took a masala dosa break in between (nothing like South Indian fare when you are eating out every day).

Pick Of The Day: The Death Of Louis X1V

The Death of Louis XIV underlines the universal truth of life: After the game of chess is over, the king and the pawn go into the same box. Death is a great leveller ... it doesn't spare even emperors. This claustrophobic film is set entirely (!) within the royal chambers of a dying eighteenth century French emperor Louis IV ... the sun makes barely an appearance and to think he was called the Sun King!

The film dwells on the deteriorating health of the bed-ridden monarch (marvellously played by Jean Pierre Leaud even though he is largely-prostrate). The only semblance of colour is provided by monarch's robes, the red curtains, the ornate upholstery and the king's oversized white wig. The lighting is dim and depressing - with candles being the only source of light -- and the mood is sombre. But my attention was kept alive by the interplay between the king and his devoted attendants as they struggle to reach a diagnosis and try out various doctors and options in the stubborn hope of a miracle.

The film is told in tight close-ups of the king and his attendants that add to the mood. Both the setting and movements is minimalist. The sound design of the film draws attention to each dying groan as well as the ominous silences that pervade the proceedings.

The wry humour in this film comes from unexpected quarters - for instance the king, a renowned aesthete, insists on a crystal glass to drink water from even when in the throes of pain. Then there is an amusing subplot to kill the "charlatan" doctor from Marseilles whose elixir made of bull sperm and frog fat supposedly hastened the king's death.

Leaud's central performance holds the film together. When the king's foot is massaged to stave off the gangrene with ointments, he finds no relief but only intensified pain. The visual that stayed with me is that of the king remaining regally stoic ... even when his cheeks glisten with tears.

The Greasy Strangler

The nudity in The Greasy Strangler is unappealing, the humour scatological, and the visuals likely to make you barf. But I allowed myself the luxury of laughing myself in bemusement at the sight of actors subjecting themselves to onscreen humiliation in the name of art. The genre is gross-out comedy and I can now say I have watched one too.

Farting and eating greasy sausages is part of the white-haired, ageing Big Ronnie (Michael St Michaels) routine. When this corny tourist guide strips at regular intervals, he inadvertently makes his adult son Brayden (Sky Elobar), whose IQ seems as low as his self-confidence, feel small in more ways than one. Big Ronnie is a cantankerous and unscrupulous man -- he not only sleeps with his son's girlfriend Janet but he also regularly dunks himself in grease and murders people by night as the Greasy Strangler of the title. You don't want to know what he does with the eyeballs.

The plot thickens (or should I say sickens) when Brayden bravely decides to investigate the case of The Greasy Strangler and ends up falling from the frying pan to the fire.

A cameo by an Indian man, who demands the advertised fizzy drink in his tourist brochure, and his many attempts at pronouncing 'potato' before he is murdered is the ludicrous height of this dipped-in-grease -and gross affair. I sat right up till the end of the film only to find out how far the absurdity stretched - many others were not so brave and fled.

-- Dinesh Raheja (Editor - Bollywood News Service)