The Sun King's Own Malevolent Genius

You can forget about Salieri as the modern world's designated greatest musical SOB of all time. Enter Jean-Baptiste Lully, portrayed in a grandiose new movie that provides a whole new dimension to the triumphant terrorism of a conductor's baton.

"Le Roi Danse" (The King Danses), by the Belgian filmmaker Gerard Corbiau, has crowned 2000 as the year of Louis XIV, Sun King, boss from hell and, here, a subject for a touch of Freudian analysis (The Mother!).

Following "Vatel," about the 17th-century Prince de Conde's tragically conscientious superchef, and "Saint-Cyr" about Madame de Maintenon, Louis's last mistress and probably morganatic wife, "Le Roi Danse" ends on a high note, literally. And there is something particularly ironic in looking at this king's cultural legacy almost 20 years after the election of former President Francois Mitterrand, who altered the face of France because he, too, saw himself destined to shine through the works of artists. It is only fair to say the first succeeded better than the second.

Like Peter Shaffer's "Amadeus," which pitted Salieri against Shaffer's personal vision of Mozart as, if not an idiot savant, at last a buffoonish one, this movie portrays the undeniably ambitious and treacherous Lully as another bad-boy genius, whose talent somehow is inseparable from the extraordinary anger and self-destructiveness that marks his life. It also portrays him as desperately in love with the king from the moment he first encounters him as a boy.

Unlike "Amadeus," however, this movie's success does not hang on its fictional subplots. Its real protagonist is the music, interpreted by Musica Antiqua Koln under the direction of Reinhard Goebel. There again, like "Amadeus," it will sell a lot of sound-track compact disks to people previously afraid of classical music, in this case Baroque.

Even by the standards of crazy princely destinies, Louis, born in 1638 after a very long wait by his parents, had a wild life. He became king when he was only 5, and reigned until 1715.