Akerman: La Folie Almayer (Almayer's Folly) (2011)

At first glance, Chantal Akerman might seem like an odd director to address Joseph Conrad’s first and most intricate novel, insofar as she tends to jettison narrative intricacy, if not narrative itself. In her modified version, which moves the setting from the 1890s to the 1950s, Almayer (Stanislas Merhar) is once again a Dutchman living on a remote river in Malaysia, where he marries Zahira (Sakhna Oum), a Malaysian woman, and has a daughter, Nina (Aurora Marion). Although Akerman is quite fluid with the timeline, most of the film takes place after Nina has grown up, moved to the city to enrol in a Western boarding school and, finally, been ejected, at which point she comes back to live with her father on his decaying, melancholy property. While Akerman certainly removes many of the details of Conrad’s vision, her version is equally intricate in the way in which it dodges any straightforward or linear sympathy with Almayer: the film is continually decentering our perspectives and perceptions, forcing us to identify with characters who have no narrative voice, or whom we only experience in incidental and tangential ways, most of whom are related to Nina in some fashion. Nevertheless, that doesn’t quite suggest an alternative narrative so much as a different kind of narrative time buried within Conrad’s vision – the same distended, modernist time that made Akerman the perfect director to adapt Proust – so it’s striking that, like Conrad, she returns time and again to the river and the jungle, which becomes the interface between their two visions, the point at which they mingle, converge and contemplate each other. Great portions of the film are spent suspended on the water or moving through vegetation, since it’s only here that it really feels as if Akerman’s found something commensurate to the slowness and contemplation of her camera; every movement feels modelled on a few key shots in which objects and figures float, swim or row imperceptibly towards or away from the lens. That’s not to say that it mysticises the jungle and river in the same way as Conrad but that it exhausts it, exhausts anything you could project onto it, uncoils and disperses everything that Conrad himself projected onto it - like a map drawn in reverse, a river run backwards or, for that matter, most of Akerman’s other works, it proceeds by subtraction, colonising Conrad from the inside out.