He has been labelled a sex-obsessed nihilist, a middle-aged misogynist and an Islamophobe with a rotten moral core. But Michel Houellebecq may have just suffered the most hurtful jibe of all: he has been called boring.
Critics at the Locarno film festival have given the author’s cinematic debut — an adaptation of one of his own novels –a resounding thumbs-down after the movie was savaged for its flat dialogue, confusing plot and unwelcome dose of sentimentality. There wasn’t even, they cried, much sex.
“This film is of a quite exemplary tedium,” declared the Corriere della Sera‘s critic, Maurizio Porro. “It is not the slightest bit involving … and is sadly lacking not only in substance but also in basic narrative structure. [It is] hard to make poetry out of confusion.”
The weekend press screening of The Possibility of an Island, due for general release in September, was punctuated throughout by sniggering and occasional belly laughs from the critics present. Brigitte Baudin, from Le Figaro, wrote that some journalists even left before the end, proclaiming the film both “catastrophic” and “ridiculous”.
“Michel Houellebecq is hotly debated by literary critics,” Baudin said. “But he will undoubtedly be massacred by the film critics.”
If the journalists at Locarno were less than receptive to Houellebecq’s first directorial offering, however, it may have been because the notoriously mercurial novelist had piqued their pride earlier in the day by calling off a press conference and even refusing to give a brief introduction to his film, as is the tradition. No official reason was given for the cancellation but there was immediate speculation that Houellebecq had been made nervous by predictions in Paris that The Possibility of an Island was going to be “the flop of the season”.
This unwillingness to appear in front of the press, wrote Baudin, led to an absurd game of “hide and seek” in which the author of Platform and The Elementary Particles began dodging interview requests from journalists all over Locarno, a city in the Italian-speaking canton of Switzerland. By the time he did eventually turn up, late in the afternoon, the critics were in no mood to be nice.
“It seemed he got lost in his car somewhere in the Centovalli [region],” a Swiss television executive said. “About as lost as his film.”
While The Possibility of an Island, the book, was greeted with its fair share of controversy, it was hailed by many as a work of philosophical depth and literary skill. Its cinematic equivalent, however, does not look likely to be so lucky.
“[This film] absolutely does not deserve eternity,” wrote the Swiss journalist Carole Walti, referring to Houellebecq’s exploration of the quest for immortality. “Its problems of rhythm and the total absurdity of certain scenes are topped off by the platitude of the infrequent dialogue, which ends up making everything insipid.”
Lamenting the lack of eroticism, Walti added: “Those for whom his books are all about the sex scenes also risk disappointment. The film has only got one … The pen suits him much better than the camera.”
The film critic for the Austrian newspaper Die Presse agreed. “Houellebecq … hasn’t managed to make a film with the same impact as his writing.
[It] is the usual modernist fare,” he wrote. The Spanish daily El Pais said Houellebecq had tackled his first film “with more enthusiasm than results”.–