Franklin J. Schaffner
Papillon

My father had a way of telling me things, which managed to imprint them indelibly in my young and virgin memory; probably it is like this for every child, I don't know. It was the same with films. He had 4 or 5 to which he was most attached, probably linked to some of his own particular memories.

Among these was Papillon, a film from 1973 directed by Franklin J. Schaffner.

I can't tell you the surprise and pride I felt, a few years later during a chemistry lesson at university, when the professor, to describe the spin of electrons around the atom, compared them to Steve McQueen, who in his isolation cell in French Guiana could count exactly 5 steps, no more, no less, and the other students looked at him as if he had suddenly gone mad, not knowing what he was talking about.

I have seen other McQueen films since then, but the performance delivered here remains, in my opinion, unsurpassed. Supported by a Dustin Hoffman at his prime, here in the role of the counterfeiter Louis Dega, he delivers scenes of rare intensity that follow one another set against a backdrop of tropical violence.

Despite the numerous themes tackled, in the 150 minutes of the film, what prevails is the protagonist's irrepressible, unsubduable desire to live. Even when, now old and worn out by years of imprisonment, he is offered the possibility of leading a quiet life confined in oblivion, offering, for those who wish to seek it, a warning for each of us, imprisoned in a life too, too narrow.

The hypocrisy of the ecclesiastical world, the cruelty of a prison system that tends to solve its problems simply by banishing them as far away as possible, the courage to face a society that presses, compacts, and crushes, whispering with the last remaining strength: "bastards, I'm still alive," the value of true friendship, the purity and delicacy of an unexpected return to origins... in short, the more, the merrier.

It matters little if Henri Charrière's autobiography, from which the film is adapted, turns out to be a fictionalized story. What is offered here is an authentic adventure, capable of delivering real emotions, of catapulting us directly into the mud and darkness, only to lull us among the waves of a sea of which we cannot see the end...

Some time ago, I went to the Cliffs of Moher, in Ireland, high cliffs that stand proudly over the ocean: I don't know why, but as I started counting the waves crashing beneath me, I couldn't get beyond the seventh...