Amok

It begins with Doctor Jean Yonnel, sitting and drinking, writing about how he came to be stuck in a small native village in the jungle. It was a woman, of course. For fourteen minutes, we watch him, drinking, the natives dancing, the order offered by the graceful camerawork fighting with the chaos of the editing, until a native goes mad and attacks people. He is shot down, and Yonnel tries to save him, but to no avail. In comes Marcelle Chantal, the first White woman he has seen in months. Yonnel excuses himself, shaves, dresses, and comes back, only to be devastated when she asks him to perform an illegal abortion. Her husband has been away for a year.

Director Fyodor Otsep beautiful silent film technique quickly gives way to a story of magical realism, in which so many men are captivated b the stony-faced Mlle Chantal, that I quickly grew tired of her staid excuses, and wondered why the men behaved like that. It's based on a novel by Stefan Zweig, and it certainly seems possible it's explained there, or perhaps it's one of the odd mysteries of human behavior that he so frequently peppered his works with. In any case, I thought that the compelling techniques of the first quarter hour gave way too quickly to the sordid details of another Somerset Maugham sort of story, the likes of which I had seen many times.