El passatger clandestí

Moon Child sadly failed at the box office, turning Villaronga overnight from boy wonder into unemployable auteur maudit. Several attempted projects during the first half of the 1990s – e.g. adaptations of novels by Mercè Rodoreda (La mort i la primavera, 1986) and Hanns Heinz Ewers (Der Zauberlehrling oder Die Teufelsjäger, 1909) – had proved unrealisable. To keep on working, he accepted this commission and did a decent craftsman’s job with Simenon’s Le passager clandestin, a 1947 mystery set in part on a South Sea island. From this story about the death of a movie distribution magnate, the aftermath was inevitable. Yet Villaronga had to accept what he was handed (plot was never Simenon’s strength). The direction, on the other hand, shows a master at play, especially when there’s no dialogue to deal with and everything depends on visual storytelling or just sheer pictorial splendour.

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