The Cinematheque

“One of the year’s most hypnotic and fascinating films … An intensely rhythmic, brooding, and contemplative movie.”

Michael Atkinson, Village Voice

Akerman’s final work of fiction, based on Joseph Conrad’s debut novel, is something of a sister film to La captive, her entrancing Proust adaptation from a decade earlier. Both sublimate turn-of-the-century texts into modern tragedies of male obsession; both share actor Stanislas Merhar as the obsessor. Almayer’s Folly is the more oneiric of the pair, a vision of colonial ruin conceived like a febrile deathbed dream in the jungle—albeit one marked by Akerman’s astonishing formal command. Forsaken in the wilds of 1950s Malaysia (but shot in Cambodia), avaricious Dutch tradesman Almayer (Merhar) is ensnared in a purgatorial holding pattern of his own creation: unable to parlay his mercenary marriage into fortune, wealth rests instead on the social mobility of his half-Malay daughter Nina (Aurora Marion), for whom he harbours untoward desire. Conrad’s heart-of-darkness tale ultimately grants Almayer the salve of forgetfulness as absolution; Akerman’s isn’t so forgiving.

In French and English with English subtitles

“Both fervently passionate and formally meticulous, the latest stunning coup for a director who’s made a career of repurposing archetypal storylines.”

Jesse Cataldo, Slant Magazine