Le Roi des Belges-Panorama 14

Pierre Mazingarbe describes his earlier work as a «patchwork of research, the creation of little fragile worlds, of daydreams, which end up in the films». The original source of his films, the preparatory drawings resulting from attentive observation of reality at the same time as a casting a spell on the latter, blur the frontier between realism and pure imagination. In his latest short film, Le roi des Belges, the subject is indeed the frontier and the maintenance of a territory which is not so much that of the Belgian monarchy but that of a struggling imagination. His visions, as childish as they are cruel, trace a profoundly playful and irreverent line in his work.
Already in 2010, his first short film, Blanche, showed the transient and intimate creation of a territory of imagination and desire. Approaching boys in cafés to more easily transform them into sexual objects, Blanche is the feminist version of Séverine in Belle de jour by Luis Bunuel. However, if the imaginary territory sometimes better matches our desires, it can also be the base of more nightmarish visions as in his second short film poetically titled
Les poissons préfèrent l’eau du bain. (Fish prefer bath water). In Le roi des Belges, Mazingarbe calls upon our collective imagination by describing with parody a degenerating Belgian monarchy. Princess Eve, exiled in France, tries to keep herself busy by realising her sadistic dreams of men hunting. If the princess’s crown is so small it is because her territory is just as derisory. Eve is no longer the first of women but the last representative of an imaginary kingdom whose repeated attacks against reality have left their twilight mark. Her mischievous smile hides profound disillusion, the premonition of a world coming to its end. Her beauty is one of lost causes.
_ Rémi Bassaler