A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Search This Blog
Showing posts with label Jacques Villeret. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jacques Villeret. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 30, 2025

The Castaways of Turtle Island (Jacques Rozier, 1976)

Jacques Villeret and Pierre Richard in The Castaways of Turtle Island
Cast: Pierre Richard, Jacques Villeret, Maurice Risch, René Gros, Bernard Dumaine, Lise Guicheron, Bernadette Palas, Maryse Viscard, Cléa de Oliveira, Alain Sarde, Jean François Balmer, Arlette Emmery. Screenplay: Jacques Rozier. Cinematography: Colin Mounier. Film editing: Jacques Rozier, Françoise Thévenot. Music: Dorival Caymmi, Nana Vasconcelos. 

The castaways of Jacques Rozier's satire on tourism don't know what they're in for, and frankly neither did I. The Castaways of Turtle Island is a grand muddle of a movie, starting with one plot line and then dropping it entirely for the main one: Two disgruntled employees at a tourist agency come up with the idea of offering something for the new breed of adventure tourist. They will find a desert island and drop their clients off there with no amenities, leaving them to fend for themselves in the manner of Robinson Crusoe. (The film was made 25 years before Survivor.) If you can endure 145 minutes of aimless humor and enigmatic characters, it's worth a watch, and at least the scenery is often lovely. But it failed to find an audience when it was originally released in France, and it's easy to see why.
 

Posted by
Links: , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)