Becalmed and forlorn, Orson Welles' version of Isak Dinesen's novella, adapted as a short (62 minutes) for French TV, is habitually received by admirers as his Gertrud, his Seven Women, an old master's self-summarization and testimonial. Indeed, the picture courts finality, the serenity of Chimes at Midnight toeing close to thinly veiled nihilism as Welles holds court in an underpopulated Macao in the 1860s, ultimately nullified by the fiction he has willed into fact. As Mr. Clay, the fabulously rich tea merchant, Welles listens to clerk Roger Coggio read prophecies from Isaiah; things that haven't actually taken place hold him no interest, so the old man prefers a tale about the sailor paid to impregnate a man's wife. Learning the common-legend status of his beloved anecdote, he immediately decides to turn it real. "I will see to it," and off Coggio goes to convince dour Jeanne Moreau, brooding the loss of her bloom, to play the object of worn desire to Norman Eshley, the youth picked from the gutter for his marine rags. The story's implacable trajectory mirrors the casting and shooting of filmmaking, and critics have accordingly jumped on Mr. Clay as a Welles stand-in, a director giving life to the narrative only to expire on his porch throne to the sounds of the morning. The total discarding of braggadocio in even the most exquisite deep-focus compositions may suggest an artist's acceptance of his own twilight period, until you remember Welles was merely in his early fifties, and that few oeuvres so eluded the conventional career-arc -- if the film really is about death, it is the death of the filmmaker's authorial humbug, of the puppet-master who brings his marionettes together under the veils of the bridal bed to do his joyless bidding. Clay is Welles, of course, although Welles is immortal, and his demise is only the end of an approach to cinema, and, keeping in mind the freewheeling experimenting that is to follow in F for Fake, maybe the forging of yet another new path. Cinematography by Willy Kurant.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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