Critics reviews

Even if the film finally becomes unhinged by what appears to be a disproportionate interest in its white colonialist father figure (Stanislas Merhar), it is still a rather exciting attempt by Akerman to stretch the boundaries of her art—most notably in the film's opening and closing sequences, but also in the beautiful handling of landscapes.

Gaspard Almayer is the worst kind of blinkered racist that white culture could possibly produce, but he is also a father completely in love with his daughter—a passion which moved Akerman, and sparked in her the determination to begin the long haul required (four years) to get the movie made and released, against all odds. It would be the last time that Chantal Akerman (in the words of Leonard Cohen) "came so far for beauty." At least, happily for the world, she left a lot behind.

Beginning with an opening musical number that hides a murder, continuing through the most audacious tracking shot of any film on this list, on through to meticulously chosen shots of the city and the jungle that show in thirty seconds what whole films miss about the way lives are lived, Almayer's Folly isn't typical fare for its director, but it is typically foundation-shaking.

...At a certain point the force of this magisterial slow burner, in spite of its mood of tropical languor, was totally enveloping. Even as she gets older, Akerman is still a whiz with the camera... Dean Martin and Mozart waft through this thick, humid atmosphere, providing a fitting sense of cultural displacement to this dark, pitiless meditation on the existential dead end of greed and colonialism.

Boiling the plot down to a dramatically intense and stark story, without completely overthrowing the evocative, grand themes of existentialism and patriarchy, Akerman has remained faithful to the power of the everyday and her singular body of work.

If the story sounds overwrought, the film is not. Akerman's control of the expressive elements, particularly the performances, which are at once subdued and theatrical, and the choreography of the long takes, in which actors move through the encroaching jungle, are exceptional, and all the more so for having been achieved on what was clearly a small budget.

The terrific opening sequence, set in a Cambodian brothel cum nightclub and set to Dean Martin's lazy mambo "Sway," makes the filmmaker's break with Conrad obvious. Introducing an onstage murder, she provides the novel with a new and shocking postscript — delivered before her film recounts, in flashback, a sort of ritualistic version of the Conrad story.

It's as technically virtuosic as it is emotionally resonant, a work of literature come to vibrant life with none of the hallmarks of "authentic" adaptation. In other words, it's another example of the essentiality of Chantal Akerman.

It seems no accident that Almayer's torpor, once a heartache, spreads like tendrils throughout the film. This effect of his exile is as intense as the excitement, despair, reflection or disconnect in Ms. Akerman's previous, personally felt studies of travelers abroad, from "Les Rendez-Vous d'Anna" and "News From Home" to "D'Est" and "Là-bas." "Almayer's Folly" is not friendly terrain to traverse; like some sinister version of Proust, it is a prolonged fever dream that ultimately yields madness.

One of the year's most hypnotic and fascinating films. Typically for Akerman, it's an intensely rhythmic, brooding, and contemplative movie, but the iconography of maddened white men lost in the Torrid Zone wilderness never gets old.

Akerman's formal control is, as always, astounding. But it is the richly evocative performances of Marion (aggressive yet enticing) and Merhar (wearing world-weariness like an aged suit) that cut deepest.

The resulting document is both fervently passionate and formally meticulous, the latest stunning coup for a director who's made a career of repurposing archetypal storylines, finding women in various prisons and freeing them, or at least shedding ample light on their subjugation.