Taste is an uncertain gift. It can be educated, cultivated, as long as you have curiosity, a true need to provoke and appease it. Forty years later, or almost, at the moment when these words have become a record for history, or for a chat between coffees, it can be said that what most viewers enjoy watching is an enigma: we have six comments on IMDB and only five hundred votes. Among many explanations and reasons, there is one that explains a lot: 'A king and his movie' ( La película del rey) was ahead of its time. We see in it how its director worships poetry, which is manifested not only in the words but in the silence of the landscape and also perfectly in it's characters' misery. It is certainly not a perfect neither an excellent film. It is, on the other hand, a powerful and sufficient film, somehow magical, and when it ends leaves you with candor in your chest, perhaps in that corner that inhabits our soul. If it gives you a bad taste, don't worry, come back later, but come back, because taste is something that you earn, sometimes later rather than sooner.

A film crew in Argentina prepares to shoot the wild-but-true adventures of a man who in 1860 declared himself "King of Patagonia." The director's artistic vision and his producer's business sense struggle to complete the project while dealing with the complications of losing their financial backing, fighting government red tape, and juggling an off-the-street cast and crew -- including live pigs -- in an old bus.

As the movie weaves back and forth between real life and scenes from the film they are trying to create, the project disintegrates into a madness that parallels that of the King of Patagonia. Amid a surreal desert landscape, left with only mannequins as his actors, the director's dreams turn into dust and blow away in the Patagonian wind. But all is not lost...

This is an excellent movie, echoing the real-life attempts of Sorin to make his film about de Tounens, the historical figure who, inspired by stories of travellers returning from South America, decides to make the freedom of the Aracuana indians his goal, by proclaiming himself their ruler.

Entertaining, bizarre, funny, touching -- definitely worth the viewing.

Movie-making can sometimes be, at best, a desperate enterprise, which is one reason why the process lends itself so well to satire. In this slick but all-too accurate Argentine parody a director's devotion to his pet project gradually turns to obsession when Murphy's Law takes control: anything that can go wrong does go wrong, beginning on the eve of photography with the producer's disappearance and a mutiny among the cast. The lengths to which the frustrated auteur pursues his dream, a dramatized history of a 19th century French pioneer's ill-fated quest to declare himself king over primitive Patagonia, soon lead him into delusions of grandeur equal to those of his subject, and as a result his film grows more absurd and abstract as it continues. The satire works on several levels simultaneously, with the director himself becoming a surrogate emperor, and his megalomania suggesting a parallel to the country's turbulent political leadership.