Technical Features of King Ferdinand's Love and Death The king dies, and with him dies his kingdom, his world. This is the plot of Eugène Ionesco’s play The King Dies, prompted by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Ferdinand I of Bourbon, King of Neapolitan, died in 1825, before Naples was absorbed by a united Italian kingdom in 1861. But the world of his youth, illuminated by the “obscene foul-smelling moon” – the Versailles sultan Louis XV, the world of alliance between the old enemies – the Bourbons and the Habsburgs – has long been a thing of the past, together with the French Revolution and Napoleon, who shoved it all over. The dynastic alliance of the Habsburgs and Bourbons was embodied in the marriages arranged by the widowed “fat romantic woman” Empress Maria Theresa to her daughters, Marie Antoinette – with the French Bourbon, the heir to the throne, the “stupid pumpkin” Louis XVI, and Marie-Carolina – with the “nosed freak”, the young King of Naples Ferdinand. The stupid pumpkin then bounced off under the knife of the guillotine, as did the graceful head of his wife, humiliated, slandered, ridiculed. But this is all the director Lena Wertmüller leaves behind the scenes, as something self-evident, but not shown, as prescribed by the poetics of rococo. The epic epilogues do not fit into patterned gilded frames. And all the more surprising that this film was directed by Wertmüller, known for her “cruel romances”.
But, however, even in the Night of Varenna directed by Ettore Scola, we saw the king’s heels and the queen’s hem, a ceremonial caftan that the king will not wear, and the impotent old age of Casanova performed by Marcello Mastroiani. However, despite this brevity and skepticism, Skola created a monumental picture, in the spirit of his multi-figure compositions “Terrace” or “Ball”. It cannot be said that the revolution remained outside its costumed borders.
Wertmüller found in her other films a penchant for chamber drama, albeit bloody. Through chamber drama with its short set of characters, she looks at massive historical spaces of events, in their refraction by a plot linking the emotions and actions of several people, to caricature or kitsch colorful, marked by black humor or melancholy. She likes to create a special intimate space on the other side of the door, in the interior as if changing slides with reproductions of paintings that complement the action with their style or themes. One very meaningful picture in “Ferdinand and Carolina” she made come to life – this is perhaps the most “relevant” work of the then era, meditating about himself and his end, “Saturn devouring his children” Goya. The black humor is that the Saturn of Lina Wertmüller among the cut off heads devours pasta, so emblematically Neapolitan. But the scenes of court life seem to be revived by Goya sketches for the Royal Tapestry Workshop - festive-old-regime small works of the artist, sketches of idyllic life, beautiful, but such that are no deeper than the layer of colors written before the portraits, "Naked Machi" and "Capriccios". Wertmüller only hinted at this naked macha to those who “read” the film in the key of Goya.
Powdered life before 1789, no deeper than a layer of paint, similar to the puppet theater, ended half a century ago, as can be judged by the replicas of the characters surrounding the old king. Then there was a lot of blood, tears, war and peace. Lena Wertmüller does not show all this. And that's the meaning of her version of the eternal drama "The King Dies." The story of Ferdinand, his true world, in the existential sense, is not the roar of a republican and imperial storm, “the fall of everything, the union of the mind and the Furies.” It had already been completed by then. And in the noisy crowded scenes of Napoleonic Europe, the king only floated with the flow, was ruthless, because everyone was ruthless, did what circumstances pushed him to do. And if a person is not only a stick, a stick, a cucumber, but also his special attitude towards himself, others and his unique world, Ferdinand remained so as long as Maria Theresa and Louis XVI were alive, and Diderot sat on his shaky tripod, and random metresses played the fate of the peoples, and the first partition of still huge Poland depended on whether one on duty replica one discharged doll in Versailles would say one washed, stifled pompadurche. Then Ferdinand was not just a traffic jam in the sea, but a real king, and now the real king dies, and with him dies his ghostly, but paradoxically his only real kingdom, the kingdom of political polytheses, gallant festivities, barefoot leprosy, Chinese houses, courtesans, lush hunting and adventurers-gatherers – Naples.
9 out of 10
