BLEAK DESERT 'KING' IS SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

In this latest (and first English-language) offering from Denmark's austere Dogma '95 filmmaking movement, a bus full of white tourists gets lost at night in the southern African desert. The next morning, they run out of gas at a town that has been populated by a single, eccentric hermit since the Germans closed their nearby mine many years ago.

With no communications and miles of sand between them and any inhabited settlement, the visitors distract themselves while they slowly waste away mentally and physically by rehearsing a performance of Shakespeare's ``King Lear.''

Yes, ``The King Is Alive'' screams art movie concept at its most risible. But if you can stop laughing and take it for what it is, Kristian Levring's digitally shot production stands out as both the most psychologically piercing and cinematically accomplished of the Dogma releases (the others are ``The Celebration,'' ``The Idiots'' and ``Mifune''). It's still very rarefied stuff, but it's certainly real art despite its potential for cerebral silliness.

The international cast includes Jennifer Jason Leigh and Janet McTeer as two sexually volatile (but otherwise very different) American women, Romane Bohringer as a smart and angry French one, and Lia Williams as a mousy English wife whom adversity invests with an undiscovered moral steeliness.

The latter is married to a crude dope (Chris Walker), who proves not incapable of too-late sensitivity. He's a chip off the old block; his proper but egomaniacal father (David Calder) is at first elated then thoroughly undone by the Leigh character's unaccountable affections. David Bradley plays the other elderly Brit, the one who's memorized Shakespeare and writes out and directs the play. Bruce Davison rounds out the First World contingent as a feckless American husband.

Two fine South African actors, Vusi Kunene and Peter Kubheka, play, respectively, the much-criticized driver and the hermit, who observes and narrates the whites' strange acting rituals from an insightful, if uncomprehending, indigenous perspective, a kind of reimagining of ``Lear's'' own wise Fool.

What the tourists are doing, of course, is going as mad as the old king, and Levring finds oblique but resonant connections between the castaways' breakdowns and personal betrayals and those of Lear and his daughters. To alleviate the general bleakness of the proceedings, he also gives us the enjoyable spectacle of great stage actors like McTeer playing at being very bad Shakespeareans.

On the formal front, Levring and director of photography Jens Schlosser not only capture striking views of the Namibian desert, they explore the marvelously evocative textures of sand shifting across dilapidated structures and aching skin. The use of natural light sources - one of Dogma's more questionable rules of cinematic purity - has never been applied more expressively, either, than in the film's many fire- and lantern-lit night shots.

``The King Is Alive'' may start out on a premise as seemingly misguided as the route taken by its hapless travelers, but it ends up, like ``Lear,'' as a fever dream of the destruction exposure to true nature, human and otherwise, can visit on the human soul.

``THE KING IS ALIVE''

(Rated R: sex, nudity, language, violence)

The stars: Romane Bohringer, David Bradley, David Calder, Bruce Davison, Peter Kubheka, Vusi Kunene, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Janet McTeer.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Kristian Levring. Written by Levring and Anders Thomas Jensen, inspired by William Shakespeare's ``King Lear.'' Produced by Patricia Kruijer and Vibeke Windelov. Released by IFC Films.

Running time: One hour, 45 minutes.

Playing: Nuart, West L.A.

Our rating: Three stars.

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Jennifer Jason Leigh and Romane Bohringer are stranded in the African desert in Kristian Levring's ``The King is Alive.''