|
It all starts with a murder: On stage during a live performance, singer
Dain (Zac Adrianasolo) is stabbed by Chen (Solida Chan), a man who has
come to the concert with exactly that intention. All the backgrounddancers
flee the stage, all but one, Nina (Aurora Marion), who continues dancing
like in a trance. It's only when someone tells her what just has happened
that she takes centerstage and starts singing Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus
... Years earlier: Almayer (Stanislas Merhar), a pushover if there ever
was one, has been persuaded by his friend captain Lingard (Marc Barbé) to
accompany him to Cambodia, to help him find a goldmine, to marry a rich
Malaysian woman, Zahira (Sakhna Oum), he didn't love, to send her to some
school to make a white woman out of her. All of this has only brought
grief to Almayer, especially sending Zahira to the school, which has made
her hate him. However, Zahira has given Almayer a daughter, Nina, a girl
he loves more than anything else in the world. But now Lingard asks
Almayer to send Nina to the same school as her mother, to make a white
woman out of her, too. It hasn't wokred the first time, with Zahira, and
being seperated from the girl will break Almayer's heart - but he's such a
pushover that he agrees, making his grief even bigger. Zahira tries to
save Nina from the same fate she had to suffer, but fails ... Years
later: Captain Lingard, who still hasn't found the goldmine he kept
promising to Almayer, dies in some cheap and damp room, with only his
servant Chen by his side to look after him, Chen, who has been loyal to
him and to Almayer despite everything ... Nobody knows that Lingard has
died, but when he fails to show up at Nina's school to pay her tuition,
she is kicked out with nowhere to go. Somehow she makes it back to her
parents' home deep in the jungle, and like her mother she now shows
nothing but disgust towards her father. Almayer though is too busy to
notice that, because with the death of Lingard, all of his dreams of the
goldmine have evaporated to dust. Then he meets Dain, a man of
questionable repute who is said to be either a criminal on the run, a
smuggler, or a revolutionary, depending on who you ask. But Dain promises
Almayer to help him man a new expedition to find his goldmine after all.
Behind Almayer's back, Dain meets Nina, and the two feel drawn to each
other almost immediately. The next night though, Dain finds himself on
the run, and he shipwrecks close to Almayer's place. Zahira finds him and
an accomplice passed out on the beach, kills the accomplice by smashing
his face in, and gives him Dain's trademark ring so everybody will believe
the dead body is Dain's. Then she helps Dain hide in the jungle. Zahira's
ruse works, and the next night, she brings Nina to him so they two can
escape together. Almayer chases after them, but once he has caught up, he
just cannot kill Dain in front of Nina like he has intended to and instead
helps them make good their escape. He dies that same day at his place,
with only Chen by his side ... The most intense scene of La
Folie Almayer is very probably its opening, when Chen kills Dain.
After that, no sequence of the whole movie comes even close in effectivity
- which doesn't make La Folie Almayer a bad film, it's just a bit
of a series of hits and misses: While the movie perfectly captures the
atmosphere of the Cambodian jungle, some of the direction seems to be a
bit too stagey to really convince, while some of the performances
(especially Stanislas Merhar's) seem stilted, Aurora Marion brings a
welcome rawness to her role, and while the adventure aspects of the story
get lost in its execution, the film most certainly succeeds in drawing
multi-faceted characters. In all, not a masterpiece, but by no means a
bad film - however, the movie would have certainly profited from some
trimming by about half an hour, which would have effectively tightened the
proceedings that at a running time of slightly over two hours seem a tad
too stretched out.
|
amazon.com
amazon.co.uk
amazon.de
eThaiCD.com
find Almayer's Folly at adultvideouniverse.com
