La Folie Almayer (Almayer's Folly). 2011. Belgium/France. Written and directed by Chantal Akerman. Screenplay by Akerman, based on the novel by Joseph Conrad. With Stanislas Merhar, Aurora Marion, Marc Barbé, Zac Andrianasolo, Sakhna Oum. DCP courtesy Icarus Films. In French; English subtitles. 127 min.
A prisoner of his own delusions, Almayer is the first of Joseph Conrad’s quixotic, brutal antiheroes, a poor Dutch colonial trader in the late 1800s who descends into madness as he searches for a hidden gold mine in the Borneo jungle and dreams of a “civilized” life in Europe for the mixed-race daughter he loves with an almost incandescent desperation. Chantal Akerman ingeniously transposes Conrad’s 1895 debut novel to a vaguely defined tropical outpost “some time ago” (the unforgettable opening nightclub scene, set to a karaoke version of Dean Martin’s “Sway,” suggests colonialism of a more recent vintage) and, much like Lucrecia Martel’s Zama and Lav Diaz’s Magellan, shifts the focus away from the European protagonist (Almayer is a Frenchman in the film) toward the Indigenous characters themselves: Nina, the daughter, who is caught mercilessly between two worlds; her fiercely protective mother Zahira, who has nothing but disdain for the ways of the whites; and her lover Dain, who in another time (1960s Vietnam, perhaps) would be a militant separatist who himself turns despotic. With its sickly intoxicating beauty, Almayer’s Folly is a fever dream. Akerman observed, “When I read Joseph Conrad’s book, I was struck by one scene: the father talks to his daughter to get her to stay with him, to come back to him. It moved me to the point of tears. I don’t know why or how, but I trusted that emotion. It wasn’t the colonial era that interested me. That same evening, I saw Murnau’s Tabu. And there was an electric connection between that scene and Tabu. It was from that electric shock that the desire for this film was born.”