The latest Dogme film (The King Is Alive) has an African location, a starry cast - and not a Dane in sight.

Has director Kristian Levring ripped up the rule book, asks Jonathan Romney, Tuesday May 1, 2001, the Guardian

There is no clause in the Dogme 95 rules specifying that films must be made in the register of crazed psychodrama, but since the start it has seemed a constant of the monastically ascetic low-budget series. Perhaps this is only logical. No artificial lighting, no genre, no guns - take away the frills of mainstream cinema, and what's left but characters ripping each other to emotional shreds?

The same applies again to The King Is Alive (Dogme 4) by Danish director Kristian Levring - one of Dogme's four founding "brethren" along with Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg and Soren Kragh-Jacobsen, and the last of the quartet to release his Dogme statement. Levring's film may seem like a straggler, released in Britain a full three years after Vinterberg's Festen set Cannes on its ears. Even if the Dogme phenomenon no longer feels like shock headline news, Levring's film is distinctive enough to demand attention in its own right. This time, the kitchen sink of digital vérité has been left far behind. The King Is Alive is half desert adventure, half "let's-put-on-a-show-right-here" therapeutic drama, in which a group of travellers stranded in the Namibian desert try to retain sanity by staging King Lear.

In some ways, Levring's film feels like quite a conventional, even stagy drama - a tautly scripted ensemble piece with a cast mixing eminent British actors (David Calder, Janet McTeer, David Bradley) with starry foreign names such as Jennifer Jason Leigh and Romane Bohringer, and not a Dane in sight. But The King Is Alive also feels like the rich culmination of Dogme's rigorous ethic. Cinematographer Jens Schlosser has cooked up a hot-toned delirium of desert colours that is all the more dazzling when you consider it was achieved on much the same hand-held DV cameras that produced the muddy tones of Festen and The Idiots.

Until now an unknown quantity among the Dogme roster, Levring is no young turk champing at the bit, but a seasoned director who made his first feature some 15 years ago and has stuck to making commercials since. His international advertising career explains why the auteur of a low-budget recondite digital-art venture happens to live in a towering chateau of a home in one of Hampstead's more select streets.

Oddly enough, Levring's earlier feature, which he doesn't much like and appears to have more or less disowned, was also set in the desert. "It's a coincidence, but of course you can't talk about coincidence," says Levring, whose long hair, beard and ample couture sleeves give him the look of a trendy Norse mystic. "There's something in the desert that is so claustrophobic. It's a really interesting place to put people because you can take them out of their context and study the nature of the characters. It was so obvious using Lear - the desert was the wasteland."

The film looks very much like an endurance test for all concerned - it's hard to remember another film where the actors are required to get so sweaty and sandy. But the Dogme rules didn't actually require the cast to camp out without water, and the six-week Namibian shoot had its luxuries. "We lived in a nice hotel by the sea, 10 miles from there, and the shoot was a dream - no one got sick, we were always on schedule." Even so, the rules of realism did mean roughing it more than usual. "Each actor packed their little suitcase for the character and they had just that. The rules don't say you can't use make-up but we didn't. They would roll in the sand and wore the same clothes all the time, so they got very dirty."

Despite some appearances, the film was not improvised but tightly scripted. Levring selected his unlikely cast on the basis of a need for actors who could handle Shakespeare and were prepared to rough it in a desert film shot chronologically ("The first couple of days, they just went out in the sun and burnt themselves"). Jennifer Jason Leigh appears in the film because she had got hold of a script and contacted the American casting director. "She wasn't really how I saw the part, but we met and she convinced me - she said, 'Kristian, it's much more interesting to do it like this.' "

Leigh is renowned for spending months in seclusion preparing a role, but Levring says that on this film she just mucked in. "I don't think she was different from any of the others. She did some research - I don't know what she did, but she was extremely well-prepared. And she knew it was ensemble - she didn't want to stick out."

Levring's film is certainly the most visually luscious of the original Dogme canon, the desert light clashing starkly with skin tones and costumes, especially Leigh's nouveau-hippie acidic satins. The textures, says Levring, are a simple result ofexperimenting with the Sony DV camera's "white balance" and of waiting for the right time of day. "We rehearsed, rehearsed and rehearsed, waiting for the light, then we shot the scene when we were ready, when the light was beautiful. That gave me a kind of feeling of the 1960s, where you believed in the moment, like John Cage. There's so much luck in it, but it's my job to use the luck."

What Dogme meant to Levring was a therapeutic opportunity to strip down to basics. "Like King Lear, it's about some people who go through a cure - not like a spa cure when you go to Baden-Baden, but a mental cure. It's a director cure. It's trimming away everything and being as courageous as you possibly can - a detox of technicalities."

Still, Levring says his ad career made him the director he is now. "When I was doing commercials I was shooting 90 to 100 days a year - very few film-makers get that possibility, so they don't get the habit of the camera. They don't get the playful contact with it." In the past, Levring has had offers from Hollywood to direct big-budget action films, but he just didn't enjoy the genre enough. Dogme seems to have let him belatedly discover his own personal cinema.

Levring's main reservation about Dogme is that it turned into a marketing device. "We should have had rules about the marketing, too," he says. He never expected the group and its manifesto to spark so much debate, let alone produce commercial hits. It all started, he says, as "a friendly gesture", a bit of brain-storming between four Copenhagen drinking companions, which no one in the industry, especially in Denmark, took seriously.

But some time ago Dogme became less a movement, and more an autonomous brand all comers could buy into as long as they were willing to cough up £1,000 for an official certificate. Levring is happy to detach himself from it. "We became some sort of cardinals, we had to watch them all. I hate it - I don't want to be a policeman. Now directors just have to swear they've made the film to the rules. People who want to should use it in good conscience and we must have faith in that."

Levring's next film, written in collaboration with McTeer, is another English-language project, called Innocence; it is a love story set in the 1920s, to be shot in Malaysia. It will be filmed digitally - an entire genre of digital costume drama is ripe for invention - but not according to Dogme rules. The brethren's detox cure is complete, as far as Levring is concerned. "My next film is going to be inspired by what I learned. I won't do another Dogme film, but it has revolutionised my thinking."

Still, he can imagine the four original Danish brethren reuniting to launch Dogme Phase 2, perhaps in 15 or 20 years - "only when we've got intoxicated again".

Release Date: May 11th, 2001 (LA/NY); likely to expand to other cities at later dates

Award: Best Actress (Leigh), 2000 Tokyo International Film Festival.

MPAA Rating: R (for sexuality and language)

Running Time: 109 minutes

Distributor: IFC Films

Cast: Miles Anderson (Jack), Romane Bohringer (Catherine), David Bradley (Henry), David Calder (Charles), Bruce Davison (Ray), Brion James (Ashley), Peter Khubeke (Kanana), Vusi Kunene (Moses), Jennifer Jason Leigh (Gina), Janet McTeer (Liz), Chris Walker (Paul), Lia Williams (Amanda)

Director: Kristian Levring (1986's Et Skud Fra Hjertet)

Screenwriters: Kristian Levring (debut), Anders Thomas Jensen (In China They Eat Dogs, Mifune)