Critics reviews

The film's brilliant final shift into abstract, low-light images—the physicality of the naked body in stark repose—gestures towards a possible answer; and as in Guiraudie’s later films, it’s not a comforting one. As the closing frame fades to black, romance gives way to the greater Romance of the world, a pure, sublimated desire; but it’s telling that this fullness of expression only happens under the cover of darkness. The King of Escape is the stuff of dreams.

If you’ve only seen Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, this qualifies as an “earlier, funnier” type of film, linked with the director’s general body of work by a lot of sauntering/running through forests... Full of farcical gags, odd character actors and broad high spirits, it’s also a compact, affectingly pessimistic story about our capacity for change.

Photographed in 2.35:1 widescreen, Guiraudie’s evocative compositions create visual distinctions between the world of the law and the world of desire. Oftentimes, hard cuts from the police chase to fervent lovemaking make Guiraudie’s points especially potent... Guiraudie’s amusing film suggests a society without identity categorizations, a fleeting fantasy of an alternative France that lies beyond the forbidding force of power structures.

There's a mixture of cynicism and absolute self-assurance in Guiraudie's voice in both films. This is felt in the fairy tale-like succinctness of Stranger by the Lake, and it's embodied in The King of Escape through the plainness of its sound and bold depiction of its characters' physicality: The horny bodies in the film are the sort we've learned to deem un-sexy and non-sexual.

The sex, though less explicit [than in Stranger by the Lake], is accepted as a natural urge that kicks up chaos. “The King of Escape” is more loosely put together than “Stranger,” and, considering what happens, it’s relatively underplayed. But Mr. Guiraudie also makes room for, say, a delightfully gratuitous wide-screen tracking shot when Curly chases Armand with intriguing flourishes on the score.

The series [at the Film Society of Lincoln Center] confirmed that Guiraudie, who began his career in 1990, remains unrivaled in deftly depicting desires that upend convention, whether homo or hetero—libidinous fluidity most exuberantly on display in The King of Escape... King stands alone for its welcome detonation of the unsophisticated argument that gays are “born this way” (a position that has become even more popular in the five years since the film premiered).

Part Pierrot Le Fou, part Mauvais Sang, it features an expressionistic narrative punctuated with stylized proclamations on sex, death, and other French obsessions. Yet The King of Escape maintains an emotionally resonant affect, its characters never seeming less than lifelike.

[Guiraudie's] latest, Le Roi de L’evasion (The King of Escape), makes an unlikely hero of a plump, gay, 43 year-old tractor salesman who falls in love with a 16 year-old girl and lands them on the run, humping in the woods, and moving along. Which fairly describes the narrative thrust of Guiraudie’s cinema: perpetually evading convention while indulging its primal desires.

Though often cast as a heavy (2 Days in Paris, District B13), plus-size Ludovic Berthillot is persuasive here as a sweet but naive gay man stuck in a midlife crisis... Set in the scenic Midi-Pyrenees region of southwest France, this sublimely daffy sex farce (2009) presents a warm if cockeyed vision of the region as a pansexual playground.