It's a stereotype she invented, and deserves better than. Romane Bohringer plays a French intellectual who's as mean as skunkweed. Other characters scarcely distinguish themselves enough to require mention. The King Is Alive is shallow nihilism. Yet it does pull you in, after a fashion.
Reversals of fortune arrive with both conceptual banality and pulpy kick intact.
But the usual Dogma caveats apply. Dogma's faux-documentary immediacy does zilch to capture the sense of fatal time passing or the desert's indifference to human time. Similar landscapes were granted far more awesome and alienating physical scale in any 10 minutes of Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky. See Movie Clock for show times.