Spanish Film
From deep within Louis XIV’s billowing gray afro—more a cloud than a sun—the once lively eyes of Jean-Pierre Léaud gaze out vacantly. Over the course of Serra’s simultaneously tedious and fascinating film, Léaud’s Sun King drifts and snoozes through his remaining days in a state of almost catatonic nonchalance, occasionally stopping to doff his hat or eat a fig to the great applause of courtiers.
From deep within Louis XIV’s billowing gray afro—more a cloud than a sun—the once lively eyes of Jean-Pierre Léaud gaze out vacantly. Over the course of Serra’s simultaneously tedious and fascinating film, Léaud’s Sun King drifts and snoozes through his remaining days in a state of almost catatonic nonchalance, occasionally stopping to doff his hat or eat a fig to the great applause of courtiers.
The Silence Before Bach opens with a white screen, as if signaling a departure from the darkness of cinema into the light and divinely inspired world of Johann Sebastian Bach.
“My films are very Spanish, but on the other hand they are capriciously personal. You cannot measure Spain by my films.”