Critics have trouble figuring out the plot, but they like the rush.
A Dogme 95 movie about a production of King Lear staged by tourists stranded and behaving badly in the African desert. The unsparing, invasive naturalism of digital video, which seems specially calibrated to register the play of anxiety and distress on human faces, also records an inhuman landscape of undulating dunes and blinding sky. An elderly, lonely David Kepesh, the libidinous hero of Roth's The Breast and The Professor of Desire , returns to tell of his infatuation with a much younger woman who is eventually diagnosed with breast cancer. The familiar Roth theme of relying on sex and art to fend off death is revisited, and Roth reverts to the confessional monologue with patches of eroticism and didacticism. Michael Dirda, writing in the Washington Post , and Jason Cowley, in the Atlantic Monthly , are shaken by the book's bleakness, finding its existential urgency reminiscent of Dostoevsky.