Video artist and director Niles Atallah exhumes an eccentric footnote of Chilean history with his hallucinatory and woozily experimental feature Rey. In the 1860s a French country lawyer named Orélie-Antoine de Tounens somehow persuaded the indigenous Mapuche people to crown him their king. What spurred him to sail halfway around the world in the insane pursuit of a dream, like one of Werner Herzog’s mad obsessives? Was he a narcissist with a messiah complex? Did he set out to exploit the Mapuche? Historical record is patchy, and it is the unknowns – the many ways the De Tounens episode can be interpreted – that interest Atallah.
It took him seven years to make Rey; the process included filming the actor Rodrigo Lisboa as scraggly bearded De Tounens and then burying the 16mm footage in his back garden to artificially age it. The nonlinear film opens with De Tounens’s trial by Chilean authorities, with the actors wearing papier-mache masks, as if to show the unknowability of what actually happened. The effect is like a dream painted by Lucian Freud. Rey is a weird and sometimes wonderful film, featuring moments of piercing, memorable strangeness like this; it could as easily be screened in a gallery.
