9 Fingers [9 doigts] * (2017, Damien Bonnard, Diogo Dória, Elvire, Damien Bonnard, Gaspard Ulliel) – Movie Review

Paul Hamy stars in writer-director F J  Ossang’s pretentious, alienating art movie as a man called Magloire who is on the run with no luggage or purpose till he meets a dying man who gives him a fortune. Magloire is chased by a gang, taken on board a ship, and is both their accomplice as well as hostage.

The dialogue, acting and soundtrack are painful in this hard-to-sit-through film that is only partly redeemed by its startling, beautifully shot black and white images. They are imaginative and haunting, in the manner of the photography in The Third Man.

All the characters talk in epigrams apparently taken from Christmas crackers or fortune cookies. Actually, what they are really like are the radio messages in Orphée. The performances are amatuerish. The droning techno score could give you ear ache.

With one of the main characters called Kurtz (played by Damien Bonnard) and the ship setting, you think that Ossang is accessing Joseph Conrad, but really it is more like Franz Kafka. Its distance from the work of both those authors is light years.

A virtually unrecognisable Gaspard Ulliel (luckily for him) has a cameo as the ship’s doctor.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com