Festival films usually come with notes telling us what the film is about, what we should look for etc. These are often indispensible as sometimes festival films are so wilfully obscure their narratives are lost in a sea of abstraction. Narimane Mari's "Le Fort des Fous", which was shown at last year's Locarno festival, is something of a case in point. It's a kind of dramatized documentary and the notes tell us it's 'a poetic voyage moving between past, present and imagination' and that it's 'about' French Colonialism. We should be able to figure this last part out for ourselves as we are clearly in North Africa and groups of handsome young soldiers are parading about in the sun, (all very "Beau Travail").
Like "Beau Travail" you might say this is all very homoerotic though this, too, was directed by a woman and one who doesn't like to hurry things along. If there's a point to any of this it is discernible, as I say, only from the notes. Otherwise Miss Mari could be accused of self-indulgence, (there are times when her stationary camera gives us the impression the film has stopped altogether). These beautiful young men looked bored out of their tiny skulls and so are we.
After what seems like an ungodly length of time we move to the island of Kythira, (or so the notes tell us), but please don't ask me what happens there or why we should even care. The final section could best be described as a cross between a lecture, an interview and a conversation on what war or revolution does to people. Here at last is a serius topic for a good documentary but which feels pretentiously out of place tagged on at the end of this long, (two hours and twenty minutes), very boring film. This sequence is in Greek and in English and might have made for an interesting short but Mari clearly doesn't know when enough is enough and this sequence too, outstays its welcome. No doubt pseudo-intellectuals will lap it up.
