ALMAYER’S FOLLY (LA FOLIE ALMAYER) World Cinema

For her first narrative feature in six years, Chantal Akerman loosely adapts Joseph Conrad’s first novel in what is almost a companion piece to her 2000 masterpiece LA CAPTIVE (also adapted from the work of a literary giant, Marcel Proust). Using richly atmospheric and concentrated long takes, Akerman slowly exposes complex layers of stifling and self-destructive male obsession; the film is an allusive cinematic fugue. Almayer (Stanislas Merhar) is a failed European trader in Malaysia. His resolutely unhappy marriage to a local woman has produced a daughter, Nina (Aurora Marion ), whom he now forces to attend a Western school in the hopes of saving her from a country he has grown to hate. Akerman is highly sensitive to the story’s tragic paradoxes, and the film’s vivid and lush cinematography, reveling in tropical textures and shifting rays of sunlight piercing dark interiors, evokes the haunting, dream-like beauty of F. W. Murnau.