Jean-Charles Fitoussi

The aged German composer goes to the Eternal City upon invitation of the King of Rome for whom he has already worked, and who has just commissioned eight nocturnes. Who is this mysterious King of Rome? He seems to have at least four personalities. First of all, he is an imaginary character who, today, would be the monarch of Rome and whose regal palace would be none other than the Villa Medicis, where most of the movie is set; therefore he is somehow in charge of the Villa Medicis. However, the title of the movie also refers to the King of Naples who, in the eighteenth century, had ordered a series of nocturnes from Joseph Haydn. It’s hard not to picture the “King of Rome” himself, that is to say the son of Napoleon I, who died young, and of whom we see traces in the serious and somewhat wistful face of a young boy (also reminiscent of some portraits of Mozart as a child).

A premonition of death – the omnipresent narrative thread of the movie – can be read in this child’s features, and it could be said of him what Arkel said to Pelleas in Pelleas and Melisand: “Say, I had never noticed it, but you have the serious and friendly face of one who is not long for this world.” We see this face several times throughout the movie. The camera even stops dead in its tracks to position itself directly in front of this face (quite exceptional for this movie). This, added to the fact that Fitoussi went so far as to feature this boy’s face on the movie’s poster: all reveal the importance of this seemingly minor character (whether or not related to the “eaglet”).

Our composer is invited to a grand social gathering to celebrate his arrival. The party is held in the gardens of the King’s palace, that is to say those of the Villa Medicis, where director Fitoussi has just spent some time concocting his film, which is, in sum, an “envoi de Rome”, as were once called the works composed on location by artists having been awarded the Grand Prix de Rome. This evening constitutes the main sequence of the film and is by far the longest. Ghost-like characters (I’ll explain later) continually bump into each other, interfering with the ballet performed by waiters dressed in white outfits starkly contrasting with the dark and nocturnal appearance of the guests, and occasionally interfering with an actual ballet being performed by folk dancers from Sicily (a happy, if unwitting, hint at the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies governed by the King of Naples, the double of Fitoussi’s “King of Rome”?). Soon, images of war, of air raids, of tanks moving forward are superimposed over these images of the party. We then remember information given at the beginning of the film: this composer was born in Rome at the outbreak of World War II to German parents who, until 1944, endeavored to defend Italy against the Allies’ attacks. That is why, after a painful initial reminiscence of the loss of his wife, traumatizing memories blend inside his mind with images of this party in his honor. Convinced he has grown too old to be able to compose anything whatsoever (like Haydn at the twilight of his life, but is this really a coincidence?), the composer rejoices at the idea of dying in Rome in a time of peace, since he was born there in a time of war; soothed by the thought that, in the end, he will have lived long peaceful years and that peace is but the miracle that occurs between two wars, just as life is an extremely rare exception to death, to paraphrase Nietzsche in The Gay Science. Mozart’s music and the faces of pretty girls – his wife’s among them – glimpsed at the end of the movie will act as his Apollonian psychopomp, guiding him on the path towards death.

2. Music for camera, telephone and computer

To produce Night Music for the King of Rome Fitoussi used a kind of “telephone camera” (a new development in the panoply of modern filming gear) and a computer for editing and sound work. As a result, the image is naturally blurry and gets even blurrier as the screen upon which it is projected gets larger. The image, quite sharp in the pane of the telephone-camera, gets diluted as the screen surface expands. This “dilution” is to be understood literally: For the blurriness – at first unavoidable – becomes intentional (a lucky break, in accordance with the aesthetics of the auspicious encounter mentioned earlier) and immediately evokes this liquid element: as if we were watching the movie through the murky waters of an aquarium. The weather is dry, yet it looks as though rain is pouring down on the city. Also, at the beginning of the film, during a short evening stroll through the streets of Rome, one gets the vivid impression of seeing and hearing rainfall when all there is to hear are the first measures of Ravel’s Ondine. Brief, but leaving a lasting impression, I would have loved this sequence to last longer.

As for the sound, or, more precisely, the music (which plays an essential part here) it is not something added as an afterthought, but rather an element participating in the very constitution of the image, becoming embedded in rather than simply illustrating it, as is the case with most of his films. How many perfectly plain cinematographic sequences manage to grab the viewer’s attention and keep it, thanks only to a music so beautiful that it forces viewers to forget the banality of the images? But in Night Music for the King of Rome image and music are tangled up inextricably, forming contrapuntal layers that add an even greater complexity to the already woven fabric of superimposed images and multi-dimensional soundtrack (much in the same style, as far as music is concerned, as the famous third movement of Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia). It’s like the Sicilian ballet, where the accompanying music is irrelevant to the rhythm of the dancers’ movements, a kind of offbeat rhythm highlighting the (relatively) autonomous nature of music and dance. And once again, this is imposed upon the filmmaker rather than being the result of a preconceived will, since Fitoussi was not able to properly record the sounds of the Sicilians as he was filming them (the telephone-camera isn’t exactly suited for this task). Yet he managed to make the most of this opportunity, turning something arbitrary into something necessary, to paraphrase Paul Valéry. Let us also mention the sudden fade-up of Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussions and Celesta during a sequence featuring Balinese music, in a completely different rhythm, and the eventual melding of both of these pieces of music with Mozart’s Masonic music. It seems to me that Fitoussi, though certainly not alone in his endeavor, is paving the way to a new relationship between the cinematic and musical arts: instead of being woven separately and then put together, image and sound exist as fibers of a single strand.

3. The Ball of the Dead

The larger the screen grows, the more distorted the characters become as they begin looking more and more like ghosts and the undead. Here, blurriness does more than just wrap something in a veil of vagueness. It also removes the flesh from bodies and faces, thus transforming Fitoussi’s characters into zombies comparable to George Romero’s terrifying creatures.

Indeed, the King of Rome’s welcoming party is reminiscent of a Vampire’s Ball or a dance of death. Very few characters escape this disfiguring process: the composer, because we never see him, a few young women upon whom the blurring has a flattering effect, and finally the aforementioned young boy who is entitled to a zoom. The others are deprived of half of their faces, like François Villon’s hanged men. Who are they? I would say that they come from the dreams of a dying person (just as the composer is dying; he is the true viewer of the movie, after all). But then, they might come from the dreams of one already dead, if such dreams can exist. Let’s imagine that a person, dead and buried, deprived of all his faculties, has kept – thanks to a phantasmagoria reminiscent of those invented by Marcel Aymé (from whom Fitoussi draws inspiration in Les jours où je n’existe pas/ The Days When I do not Exist) – the ability to dream. Those dreams would probably resemble the images presented to us by Fitoussi in his latest movie: they would resemble the dreams of the dead. This oneirism from beyond the grave might make you smile; but they could also chill your blood. At any rate, Fitoussi’s Night Music is basically a provisionary dive into death, reminiscent of Ulysses’s descent into Hell in the Odyssey and of Pelleas’s descent into the subterranean regions of the castle under the guidance of Golaud, who aims to kill him. Both heroes come out of their ordeals alive and well, as happy as the musician in Night Music on the eve of his death.

Opus n° 6, though very different from Fitoussi’s earlier films – especially in its nocturnal aspect, which clashes violently with the bright light of those other works – nevertheless remains faithful to the theme of the rest of his body of work: the prevalence of life over death. The structure of Night Music for the King of Rome follows that of Le Dieu Saturne (The God Saturn) by the book: a sharp and comical presentation of all the reasons why one should hate life (inspired by Schopenhauer), followed by a thanksgiving-like conclusion singing the praises of happy living (or, in the case of Night Music’s composer, of having lived happily). Formed in the same mold, Fitoussi’s previous movies never let pessimism win over: death’s rigorous logic always fails to outsmart the absurd logic of life.