Story of My Death (2013)

Untimely Review #4

If you want to know how someone in the 18th century felt about life as they were living through it, you go pick up a book or take a trip to the art museum. As hard as they sometimes work to convince you otherwise, period films are always going to be filtered through some modern’s agenda—and I mean this as neutrally and non-pejoratively as possible. Not to be the guy who’s always bringing up Rohmer, but Rohmer’s Perceval is one of the few attempts I know of to inhabit the mind of the people in the time being depicted and to make a movie from as close to ye olde pointe of viewe as it would be possible to reconstruct from hundreds of years out. Catalonian director Albert Serra has a much different schtick, or at least he did before 2022’s Pacifiction. Serra gets a bunch of his friends to play dress up and traipse around sensuously lit 18th-century European sets, where they engage in strange and sometimes transgressive behaviors. Story of My Death (2013) forms a loose trilogy with The Death of Louis XIV (2016) and Liberté (2019), all films interested in how aristocrats comport themselves in moments of historical transition.