The Barefoot Emperor is a quadrinational, trilingual political satire about a shy King of the Netherlands’s, who’s recently been dethroned, rise to power as Emperor of “New (fascist) Europe,” and if that doesn’t sound a little bit extra this might be the movie for you. The opening chyron foreshadows how batsh*t crazy this movie is, explaining that the present day Dutch king has lost his kingdom but cannot return by plane because of a “solar storm” which prevents him from returning, so he wanders Eastern Europe “incognito” until being shot at a commemorative reenactment of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Allow me a moment to take a breath after that. Barefoot is not interested in your comfort. Fuck your comfort. But also, just as it feels like it’s going to accelerate beyond your ability to follow, you arrive in a sanatorium, the setting for the rest of the movie.
At first, the island sanatorium, the real life former vacation home of the Yugoslavian dictator Josip Broz Tito, feels like an absurdist summer camp, where celebrities receive some needed, anonymous R&R. King Nicolas is surrounded with his three dutiful attendants, blending in best they can while their king recovers from his accidental assassination attempt. The film’s absurdist humor features gags like Carlos, Nicholas’s young assistant, who, when prompted to take a spot on open mic, chooses to use his entire time to hold his breath on stage. There’s another man, Mr Burton–all of the characters have been given the nicknames of their room’s original inhabitant–who goes up to decry the unnatural pairing of llamas and zebras on the island, which feels zany at first and then turns dark as he parrots the language of race science. Nicholas, who plays the role of the cool-tempered everyman, asks how Mr Burton would feel if the llama were a “gay Muslim with Sudanese origins.”
Barefoot’s politics are shown instead of soapboaxed. The satire does a lovely job of casting liberal progressivism as the reasonable default in contrast to the clownish fascists in charge of the camp, Mr “Troll” Kroll at the top and his German goon squad accompanying. When Carlos fails to escape from the island by swimming, he’s rescued by a group of “undesirables,” kind-hearted Sikhs with a penchant for singing and a beautiful chrome red submarine. No one makes mention of their migrant identity, though the villains of Barefoot certainly talk around them. The off-site coordinator of the island, who turns out to be the architect of this fascist-backed puppet regime attempting to seize power in the chaos of a recently dissolved EU flirts with language reminiscent of the Holocaust, “Wallonia will be an exit for the undesirable migrant… Would you rather I say they should be ‘checked out through the giftshop?'” In some ways, however, I wish the film had spent more time trying to build out its characters of color. It’s maybe too much to ask a film featuring entirely German and French-speaking actors who are clearly grappling with their own role in a newly-formed racist society, but for whatever reason, the fact that these “climate refugees” from a “flooded cheese factory in Kolkatta” speak almost entirely in devout fortune cookie aphorisms (“God is there to make you laugh when you are crying and make you cry when you are laughing”) feels a little hollow.
The final scene of the final act is likely to be divisive. It’s either the most fully considered moment in the whole film, well-choreographed, silly, joyful, and subversive, or it’s a toothless, saccharine answer to the question the film has been posing over and over again, What hope is there for liberalism to prosper in a nationalist, racist society? Some might see the ending as the director losing focus, like the ending of Blazing Saddles, spinning out of control but not quite in as cleverly devised a way as Mel Brooks could manage.
The Barefoot Emperor is for a very particular kind of audience, someone who misses John Cleese and the Monty Python absurdism of the 70s, but doesn’t really want John Cleese’s Brexit politics. It’s an ambitiously told story that poses a lot more questions than it manages to answer.
