Almayer's Folly

Joseph Conrad's first novel Almayer's Folly is an exotic tale involving pirate treasure, the son of a Rajah, and a rebellion in the jungle.  The novel, published in 1895, belongs to the conceptual world of Puccini's Madame Butterfly; it is the story of an Asian woman destroyed by sexual exploitation, although this aspect of the Conrad novel remains at its margins as a "ripping tale" of lust and greed in the mangroves swamps of Malaysia.  Chantel Akkerman repurposes the narrative in her 2011 film to focus more exclusively on the colonialist aspects of the story.  She puts gender and race issues in the foreground and conceives of the picture as an allegory of failed colonialism.  Her film is striking in some respects, but misguided -- by eliminating or marginalizing the adventure story elements (Conrad's "sea-shells and miniature boats" as Nabokov said derisively), she turns the on-screen narrative into an absurdist and incoherent exercise in malaise, more Samuel Beckett than Conrad.  This wasn't Akkerman's original intent -- you can read her plot summary and "statement of intent" at LOLA, a film web-site on the internet:  as described in the precis for the proposed film, Akkerman retains enough of Conrad's story to establish relationships between the characters that are ill-defined, even, inscrutable in the movie as it was actually shot.  The opening frame sequence isn't described in Akkerman's abstract of the film's planned narrative -- and, so, this element of the movie remains particularly inscrutable.  Paradoxically, by emphasizing the elements in the story relating to racism, Akkerman ends up with a film that is implicitly more racist in the way that it portrays the non-European characters than Conrad's rather quotidian late Victorian racial prejudices -- the "white man's burden" and all that sort of stuff. 

Up a river in Malaysia, Almayer lives in an elegant, minimalist wood house, more of a gazebo than a mansion, but a place with polished wood floors and big open windows where curtains billow like the sails of ships.  Almayer has a Malay wife, Zahira, who is sinister and, apparently, completely insane. A Dutchman, someone named Lingard, appears to take Almayer's daughter, Nina, away to the city.  Lingard's relationship to Almayer is uncertain and Akkerman can't be bothered to clarify things -- a casual viewer may think that Lingard is really Nina's father because the Dutchman seems to have somehow transferred his former girlfriend, Zahira (who is mad as a hatter) to the unfortunate Almayer.  Almayer and Lingard are both exemplars of Nordic masculinity with haggard faces, thousand-yard stares, gaunt and blonde and, at first, the viewer can't tell them apart.  They talk in curiously intimate terms about Nina and, ultimately, the eight-year-old girl is ripped from Zahira's arms and dispatched downriver to be raised in a boarding school and educated to assume the role of well-heeled European young lady.  The money runs out.  Lingard goes to the city to retrieve Nina, but dies.  Nina can't pay tuition at the boarding school and, so, she is expelled. She walks aimlessly around the city, an opportunity for Akkerman to deploy her trademark moving camera, dollying alongside the heroine in interminable pointless shots of the young woman doggedly walking through the mean streets of some southeast Asian city.  Nina's odyssey ends when the heel of her shoe gets broken.  Almayer's factotum who was with the dying Lingard, somehow, finds the girl and they go back upriver to Almayer's plantation.  Almayer is continuing to flounder around in the impenetrable jungle looking for something.  On one of his excursions, he meets a figure that materializes from the forest, the sinister Dain Maroola, a handsome "rebel with cause" who has James Dean affectations. Dain falls in love with Nina.  Nina is a profoundly damaged character -- she has been humiliated by the European girls at the Boarding School and hates European culture.  But she's not Malaysian either by reason of her mixed blood.  "I am not White," she keeps saying plaintively.  Now and then, Dain and her mom, the demented Zahira, will also chime in:  "You're not White," they helpfully tell her.  For reasons that make no sense at all, Zahira mutilates a corpse in a typhoon so that the headless body will be identified as Dain.  Dain plans to flee Almayer's impoverished compound with Nina who doesn't love him, but will do anything to get away from her possessive, and increasingly, deranged father.  Ultimately, she and Dain are caught by Almayer but he doesn't shoot the smarmy lover, instead conveying them by his little outrigger with battered outboard motor to a spit of white sand.  The passing boat that plies the river picks up Nina and Dain and they depart forever, wading out to the boat in another interminable (and implausible) sequence.  Almayer sits in the dappled light in front of his gazebo-like house and goes mad with grief:  he recalls that he didn't want Nina to go around barefoot, because she would "get her feet muddy."  The film ends on this disconsolate note of insanity, sadness, and despair.  Nothing explains the film's first five minutes:  in that sequence, we see bar girls sitting in front of a sort of Cambodian beer-hall.  On stage a handsome kid with a mouth like Mick Jagger is lip-synching to a song by Dean Martin.  An Asian guy comes into the beerhall.  He glares at the singer and the group of bar-girls behind him forming a sort of pathetic chorus line -- the girls are swaying back and forth in drug-induced trances, making motions with their hands and hips that look vaguely like some kind of inept hula dance.  The Asian guy stabs the singer -- Dean Martin's crooning continues as the guy falls down with a knife in his heart.  Someone says that Dain has been killed.  Then, the camera moves into a close shot of one of the numb-looking hula dancers:  this is Nina who has been reduced to working as a back-up dancer for Dain.  Nina who seems eerily detached and indifferent sings Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus in a big operatic close-up standing in front of a painted flat depicting the South Sea islands.  Cut to moonlight on a big river and the useless title:  Vant Ailleurs ("Some other time, someplace else") -- then, we hear the opening chords of Wagner's prelude to Tristan and Isolde, music that re-occurs in a way that seems random throughout the film. 

Akkerman has obviously transmuted the action to Laos and Cambodia in the nineteen-fifties -- Almayer listens to LP records of Gene Vincent.  The dialogue is conceived as monologues or exchanges of aphorisms, filmed in protracted sequence shots.  Akkerman's formidable style seems here to have decayed into Mannerism throughout most of the film although there are some sequences that are imposing and have real flair.  The picture involves long silences and many completely pointless shots of people walking down dark corridors or gloomy city streets.  There are equally long tracking shots in the jungle showing the characters trudging around aimlessly in trackless brush -- Almayer has lived on this plantation for thirty years and never managed to build any trails through the woods and swamp?  Sometimes, for variety, Akkerman puts the camera on a canoe and pushes it around in the mangrove swamps.  Everything is lush, overgrown and the forests are all flooded as in a Tarkovsky picture.  Everyone is always tramping through knee-deep water that foams and splashes around their ankles.  The characters always stand like figureheads in the prows of the little boats that drag them upriver, even if the boat is as tiny as a canoe.  About a third of the picture takes place in torrential downpours.  Motivations are announced in speeches but never really shown.  We are supposed to think that Almayer has sacrificed everything for the love of his daughter, but we don't ever see the characters together and his passion for her (which has creepy incestuous quality) is strangely remote and abstract   In the beginning of the film, Zahira flees with Nina -- it's obviously an allegorical or metaphoric flight because they don't do anything but jump into the shallows of the river and hide in the underbrush waiting to be found.  There are some effective sequences.  A long showy sequence shot involves fireworks erupting over the remote far bank of the river and, then, a glorious Asian boat, with dragon prow, slowly crossing the dark waters in a bubble of red and gold enchanted light.  This is Abdullah who has come to ask for Nina's hand in marriage to  his son -- the fireworks are commemorating the young man's return from a pilgrimage to Mecca.  This sequence has an otherwordly quality:  here Akkerman deals with Conrad's source material, by just having someone narrate the plot points that the sequence is supposed to make:  these rather prosaic plot points (the marriage offer and Almayer's rejection of it) have nothing to do with the rest of the film and the striking imagery of the dark jungle and waters, the fireworks and the slow, mysterious advance of the fairy-tale vessel across the Stygian black river is memorable, but, ultimately, non-narrative -- it doesn't connect with anything else in the film.  (In the LOLA essay, Akkerman notes that she wanted to see if she could re-make Murnau's Tabu as imagined to occur in the 1950's -- certainly, the spectral approach of the little brilliantly lit dragon ship, a sequence that lasts about five or six minutes, is like a similar scene in the Murnau picture.)  The ending sequence is like Andy Warhol filtered through Josef von Sternberg at his most exotic:  Almayer sits on the stoop of his mansion with the light on his face dappled as it falls through moving draperies of vine and leaf:  sometimes, Almayer's face is mostly in the shadows; at other times, he seems resplendent with light.  The scene goes on and on and on, with Almayer muttering only a few words:  "Don't walk barefoot" and "You'll get your feet muddy."  This protracted scene is effective in that it ties some of the long, tedious sequences of people plodding through mud and swamp-water into a thematic knot -- in fact, even the city scene where Nina finally collapses having lost her uncomfortable shoes can be viewed as a variation on the them established by this ending. 

I have said that Akkerman's approach to this material, emphasizing the agency of the poor, doomed Nina, is inadvertently racist.  This is demonstrated by the final shot in the movie.  The White man is theatrically lit and posed like a haggard Marlene Dietrich, emoting up a storm while the inscrutable Asian servant stands like a statue behind him, half out-of-focus and merely a decorative element in the image.  (Presumably, it is this decorative figure who kills Dain in the opening "frame" sequence.)  Even more troubling is the fact that the movie abandons its heroine.  What does she do after Dain is killed?  How did Dain, the heroic revolutionary, become a mere pimp?  These are issues relating to the fates of the non-White characters and, although Akkerman claims to care about them, her strange narrative emphasis reduces these figures to mere bystanders to the drama involving Almayer and Lingard (who gets a showy death scene).  Like its heroine, the film is a fatal mixture of incommensurate elements -- it's neither fish nor fowl.  Akkerman wants to stage some sequences like the old Hollywood directors but she doesn't have the technical aplomb to pull this off.  The long tracking shots and the ending are from an experimental cinema at odds with the Conrad story.  Elements of the Conrad story, battered and mostly unrecognizable, are like bits of debris washed-up on a South  Seas beach.