The Death of Louis XIV review – a quietly amazing portrait of the end of life

This quietly amazing film is conceived in terms of pure minimalist intimacy. Some might feel that it should be a stage play, and there is something Beckettian in it, a Happy Days for one lead character. But that would be to misread its eerie, closeup effects on faces. The candlelit sombreness makes it painterly, or more like a tableau vivant.

In what seems like real time, the film takes its audience through a historical event, the death of Louis XIV, placing us by the royal deathbed in the days and hours before he died in 1715 of a blood clot. Frowningly solicitous courtiers come and go. Murmuring physicians suppress their obvious terror of being blamed. Ladies-in-waiting simperingly attempt to keep His Majesty’s spirits up and greet his pathetic attempts at gallantry and good humour the way they might an infant doing his toilet training. And the king slowly dies.

At 73, Jean-Pierre Léaud gives what could be the performance of his career as Louis XIV. It is inspired casting. The director Albert Serra might have considered bringing Alain Delon out of retirement for the role, or even Jean-Paul Belmondo. But that somehow would not have been as powerful or as poignant. As the young lion and icon of the French New Wave, Léaud became part of the history of cinema. His face as a boy became lasered on audiences’ minds in the final freeze frame of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. Now that face, in old age, is gradually immobilised by fictional death. Cinema promoted him from the streets to the aristocracy of French culture. The next evolutionary stage is monarchy.

Movingly, and often terrifyingly, Léaud gives a superb approximation of what the slow approach of mortality looks like: the retreat into fatigue, into a strange combination of fear and calm, into mysterious stillness. The gradual leaking of life looks like the disappearance of moisture from wet sand in the sun. I can’t think of any actor who has over the space of a feature film given such a brilliant portrayal of the protracted moment of death.

We see him first outside in the gardens of Versailles, and then, feeling unwell and tired, he comes inside and takes to his bed. There is a subtle, but heartstopping moment in this opening sequence, when Léaud’s king appears to gasp or gape, his mouth flapping briefly open and shut. He looks like an injured baby bird; it is a sign of his body beginning to break down, succumbing to trauma.

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Inside, his attendants are keeping up the fiction that His Majesty is merely indisposed, although naturally they are greatly concerned. The king looks like a bizarre figure on the bed, hugely plump in the midsection, like an angler’s float, but always sporting his royal peruke, a surreally large helmet of false hair rising as if in two big horns: he is a public figure, always on view. At no moment can he withdraw into privacy.

The ladies applaud his attempt to flourish a hat in greeting, and his heroism in eating an egg for dinner. His attendants discuss affairs of state with him. With studied worldliness, they gossip about the desirability of various noble ladies, for all the world as if the king could act on any notional lechery.

They are in denial. And anyone who has been with a dying person knows what this is like. The physicians dare not voice a regicidally disloyal conviction that the king is facing the end. But the denial gradually lifts, and it is impossible to tell at what point hope turns into fear, and then into a new certainty. There are endless little ministrations to make the dying man comfortable – futile and yet profoundly important. In their desperation, the doctors even indulge a useless quack remedy from a charlatan, but its failure is not the occasion of bitterness.

The simplicity and clarity of the death itself is moving: the performance is almost like a reverse of the Marat/Sade. There is no grandstanding, no grandiloquence, even when Louis addresses his uncomprehending five-year-old great-grandson and heir on how to rule France. And the death itself is almost immediately followed by an anatomy, beginning with the intestines.

Dying of old age should be the most commonplace thing. This film reveals it to be an extraordinary, eerie spectacle, waiting for all of us. It is Jean-Pierre Léaud’s finest hour.