La Plage noire (2001) - film review

In an unnamed country, a group of revolutionaries say their goodbyes, glad to have seen a brutal dictatorship replaced by a nascent democracy.  When his wife Sylvie returns to her native France to report on her country’s political transformation, A., a well-known militant, attempts to get a visa for himself and his daughter Joyce to join her.  Whilst waiting for the administrative processes to do their work, A. retires to a holiday home on a deserted beach with his daughter.  It soon becomes apparent that new regime is not quite what it appears to be…

Distinguished actor Michel Piccoli followed his promising directorial debut Alors voilà (1997) with this dark, Kafkaesque drama, an unusual work which has left cinema-goers perplexed and critics thoroughly divided as to its merits.  Certainly, Piccoli appears to have gone out of his way to make this an unusual and challenging film and right from its opening sequence the film does little to engage its audience.  Whilst the mood of the piece is striking, its content appears to be virtually non-existent, and with every passing minute watching this film becomes an increasingly torturous experience.  For most spectators, the boredom threshold will have been exceeded within the first ten minutes.  For those who stay the course,  the film doesn’t really have much to offer.

The problem with the film is not its style, which admittedly is arty but not totally unappealing.  What really offends is the totally abstract nature of its narrative.  Neither character nor location has any concrete form and without this it is hard, if not impossible, to develop any kind of interest in the drama.

Michel Piccoli has clearly been inspired by the works of Franz Kafka and has attempted to create the cinematic equivalent of the world of abstract paranoia which pervades Kafka’s work.  The problem is that (a) Michel Piccoli is not Franz Kafka, (b) few spectators have any first hand experience of the world in which Kafka lived, and (c) it is notoriously difficult for even an experienced director to transpose a complex literary work into an effective piece of cinema.  Piccoli’s failure in doing the latter is emphasised by a lamentably weak script and some unutterably wooden acting performances.  The film’s only artistic strong point is Sabine Lancelin’s wondrously atmospheric photography, which certainly does evoke the mood of Kafka’s novels – but this really cannot make up for the film’s glaring deficiencies in other areas.

© James Travers 2004

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