Friday or Another Day

Moine’s historical drama is ‘liberally adapted’ from Michel Tournier’s novel, presumably to allow for a more expansive metaphorical purpose. It’s a French version of a Robinson Crusoe shipwreck tale, with Nahon playing the middle-aged Comedie Française actor who is the sole survivor when his ship founders on the shore of a small Pacific island. Moine encourages a great performance from Nahon, railing about his loss of language as his solitary years roll by, surrounded only by a gallery of costumed dummies over whom he takes mock Governorship. The arrival of ‘Friday’ (‘named after the day I spared your life!’, says Nahon) triggers  a revolution in his emotions and thinking that may or may not echo those obtaining in his home country post-1789. Constantly intriguing, beautifully shot, it works towards an epiphanic finale as moving as Ruy Guerra’s ‘Sweet Hunters’.