Le film du roi

Movie-making can sometimes be, at best, a desperate enterprise, which is one reason why the process lends itself so well to satire. In this slick but all-too accurate Argentine parody a director's devotion to his pet project gradually turns to obsession when Murphy's Law takes control: anything that can go wrong does go wrong, beginning on the eve of photography with the producer's disappearance and a mutiny among the cast. The lengths to which the frustrated auteur pursues his dream, a dramatized history of a 19th century French pioneer's ill-fated quest to declare himself king over primitive Patagonia, soon lead him into delusions of grandeur equal to those of his subject, and as a result his film grows more absurd and abstract as it continues. The satire works on several levels simultaneously, with the director himself becoming a surrogate emperor, and his megalomania suggesting a parallel to the country's turbulent political leadership.