What follows is a review I wrote for this week's edition of The Jewish Week. For reasons of space, the piece didn't make it into the paper but I think you will find it worth a bit of your time.
Aurora Marion as Nina in Almayer's Folly
In 1985 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak published a key
work “Can the Subaltern Speak?” The essay, which redefined the entire direction
of the nascent academic field of post-colonial studies, argued that “everything
that has limited or no access to the cultural imperialism,” her description of the
“subaltern” in a later interview, is rendered incapable of being part of a
dialogic relationship with its oppressors.
Although the example she chose to make her point was that of Indian
widows who underwent sati, ritual
burning on their husbands’ funeral pyres, it would be obtuse not to see that
she is concerned with a vastly wider range of people subjected to
institutionalized silencing, victims of patriarchy, racism or class oppression.
One hesitates to add anti-Semitism to that list. Not
that Spivak isn’t sensitive to its appalling nature, but the cultural position
of the Jew in Christian society historically is subtly different from the
subalterns of empire, if only because Christianity owes its very existence to
Jewishness. However, the end result isn’t all that different.
Chantal Akerman must have recognized all of this as
background to her latest feature film, Almayer’s Folly, which opens on August
10. Akerman is a Jew, a woman, a sometime lesbian and the daughter of a
Holocaust survivor. Speaking of her mother’s tattooed number and the dark silence
that accompanied it, I have written, “It was . . . etched as indelibly in her
subconscious as it was on her mother’s skin, and that number and all it meant
has been a deeply buried reality in Akerman’s films, even a movie that never
mentions Jews or the Shoah.”
If Almayer’s Folly isn’t a perfect expression of
that reality, it comes close, and the Spivak essay, whether Akerman is
conscious of it or not, is a guiding voice that frequently overwhelms that of
the novel’s author, Joseph Conrad. There is a nicely covert homage to Conrad by
way of his compatriot Chopin in one of the film’s lighter moments, but the
film’s credits describe Akerman’s screenplay as “freely adapted” from the book,
and it certainly is. Where Conrad’s focus is on the foolish and feckless dreams
of Almayer (Stanislas Merhar), a failed trader stranded in a decaying mansion
in the Dutch East Indies, Akerman is more concerned with the gradual alienation
of his beloved daughter Nina (Aurora Marion). What Conrad sees as a heroic act
of renunciation by Almayer becomes the womanly defiance of his daughter for
Akerman.
Akerman’s fiction films have always focused on how
women deal with their own suffocation by patriarchal institutions and quotidian
drudgery, from the slow-burning madness of Jeanne Dielmann to the comic
quandaries of woman at the center of the ménage-a-trois in Night and Day. On
some level, Akerman’s previous fiction film, The Captive, a quirky
modernization of Proust, could be read as a dry run for Almayer’s Folly,
formally rigorous, frequently witty but in deadly earnest in its exploration of
the silence of the victimized. By contrast, her documentaries are concerned
with the nature of the Other; in interviews she has cited the Other-obsessed
Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas as an influence. Almayer’s Folly combines
the two themes admirably.
From the outset of the new film, Akerman makes it
clear that she is aiming at something radically different from Conrad. Her
version is set in a timeless yet contemporary place in the developing world
(actually, Cambodia), a place of gaudily lit dancehalls and a distinctly urban
kind of decay, an hypnotically colorful counterpoint to the shadowy world of
Almayer and his dilapidated, unfinished mansion in the jungle. Where Conrad
offers the somber voice of an omniscient, starkly judgmental narrator who,
while not overtly racist, certainly reflects a “white man’s” viewpoint, Akerman
eliminates most of the novel’s narration but, tellingly, gives the little she
has retained to one of the non-white characters, spoken at the end of the
opening sequence, when he is off-screen.
It is only then that you begin to see one of the
carefully concealed but immensely important motifs that structure Akerman’s Almayer’s Folly, that the least Westernized characters are seldom seen
speaking on-screen. And they don’t say much, not even Almayer’s wife, half-mad
from his rejection of her and the brutally deracinating aspects of her adoption
and education by Europeans. By contrast, in the film’s first half, Almayer
almost never shuts up and absolutely never listens to non-whites.
For the first of the film’s two hours, it is lushly
gorgeous (beautifully shot by frequent Akerman collaborator Remon Fromont) and
as stylized as a religious rite. The decision to shift the action to a vaguely
contemporary setting changes the thematic ground by making the action literally
post-colonial, but in doing so Akerman deliberately calls attention to all those
readings of Conrad by people like Spivak and Edward Said that situate him in
the world-system of the European empires of the “long 19th century,”
as historians occasionally call it.
Which is how, to come full circle, I suddenly realized
the connection between Akerman and Spivak. The second half of Akerman’s film is
oddly hesitant and occasionally repetitious, but it has a certain cumulative
power, and it seems to offer an answer to Spivak’s famous question, one that is
subtly different from the scholar’s own analysis.
Can the subaltern speak?
Perhaps not. But she can act, and when she asserts her
otherness, it will leave an old white man to mourn.
That is, I think, a message entirely consistent with
Akerman’s fascination with the component parts of identity, Jewish and
otherwise, and Otherwise.
