The Naked King - 18 Fragments on Revolution
Documentarian and journalist Andreas Hoessli's The Naked King (a title which seems just as obscure and purposeless as its subtitle, 18 Fragments on Revolution) was never going to be made for everyone, or even for most people. Unfortunately, however, for much of its runtime it feels like it goes out of its way to alienate any viewers that show interest in the subject matter in the first place.
The film is about two revolutions, happening during a similar time period; one is in Poland, and one is in Iran. It will tell you this much itself, but from this odd and unfocused premise manages to gouge very little interest and rather too much of hot-air pretentiousness. There isn't much else notable enough to even pin down about the film.
One major problem with the picture is its insistence on a confusing structure. We follow the film through the eyes of a protagonist, ostensibly supposed to be taken as the documentarian himself but who is actually narrated in the English version by a rough, gratingly voiced Sam Riley. If the film is autobiographical, why is it not narrated by Hoessli himself, especially as the subject matter and context seems deeply interpersonal to the filmmaker? If it is not, what is the need to complexify an already unforgivingly hard-to-follow film by adding a fictional aspect?
Another major problem is its reliance on some of the most amateurish and cliché aspects of documentary filmmaking. Often overbearing narration, talking heads, rhetorical questions, extreme overuse of establishing shots (which are, apart from medium shots of interviewees, archival footage and the occasional insert shot, the only types of shot in the movie) and a numbing lack of variety make the whole thing seem like something an underprepared teacher might put on for their middle school history class. The only thing separating it from feeling like an overlong news segment is the vexing commentary.
But worst of all, the filmmaking is just bad. The camera quality is terrible (whilst it is true that the film is about events forty years ago, it is shot contemporarily). This is even commented on near the start, showing self-awareness but this is not enough. It is also poorly edited, with establishing shots stacked on establishing shots and yet still manages to confuse, with sudden narrative jumps between time periods and places without warning, often leaving the viewer confused until expository narration grounds them.
The very essence and conceit of the narrative is also poor; the film chronicles two different revolutions in two different countries but fails to find much commonality between them. The problem isn’t so much that Hoessli is comparing apples and oranges, it’s that he’s comparing apples and apples in a completely uninspiring way. He may as well have chosen any revolution, or any historical event, given that the parallels drawn are so weak. It is true that Hoessli has the footage and knowledge of both of these events more than if he had picked any random revolution (as he lived in Poland at the time and was also close to an Iranian reporter) but this doesn’t come across in any meaningful way in the film. In fact, if anything its self-proclaimed insistence on wanting to examine the microcosmic effects of revolution grates, as it focuses just as much on the major figureheads and how the events affect them - and even the scenes focused on the layperson bring little to no insight to the casual viewer. The Naked King may aim to inform, or even to entertain. Instead, it just feels like sitting through a rambling from your grandparents.