BUTTERFLY

I used to watch a lot of French movies, so I think it’s appropriate that I occasionally pick up mainstream Hollywood movies with a marginal connection to France: Papillon here and Day of the Jackal there. (Coincidentally, these two films share another characteristic that is the complete opposite of the Hollywood norm: there is no love interest in either.) Or maybe not. Nobody is going to confuse Franklin J. Schaffner with Truffaut, Godard or Varda.

Still, despite the fact that Papillon has truly come to be one of the most neglected studio releases ever released, it packs enormous power, a power that is heightened and intensified by the fact that Henri Charriere did indeed escape from the Island of Devil and lived to tell the tale. It’s a good thing Schaffner had such a knack for this kind of imagery because the mistakes in the film border on the unbelievable: liquids, both blood and water, quite visibly splatter on the camera lens and completely destroy any suspension of disbelief. The guillotine scene is unintentionally hilarious, with continuity and editing errors that make you wonder if the crew was on drugs both during filming and post-production; and the penultimate scene where Papillon dives into the ocean and we can clearly see the diver holding the float below him, so easily discernible that he or she could almost be a part of the story, all of these are truly libertine and unworthy. (In fact, there are more mistakes, easily Googled. I don’t have the heart to review everything. One involves the great actor Anthony Zerbe in the role of the leader of the leper colony.)

Which; here I want to talk about a small section of this long film, and those are the final credits, which do not take even two full minutes. This sequence almost makes me think that Schaffner actually planned a lot of the bugs to work according to the end credits as some kind of reflexivity.

As Papillon floats across the ocean on his makeshift raft after his daring jump off the cliffs, a hitherto absent narrator is sent from the universe to inform us that he escaped, lived out the rest of his life in freedom, and survived the notorious French prison. Suburb. It’s not clear to me what the advantage is of a narrator presenting himself as an uninvited guest in this way, and putting the text message on the screen would have been just as intrusive and annoying. Perhaps Schaffner felt the point was too difficult to convey with more scenes in a “show, don’t tell” manner. Perhaps more scenes would have made a long movie even longer, and thus a little less commercially viable. In any case, I think the constant breaking of the suspension of disbelief, whether intentional or not, sets up the images that accompany the end credits in a new and different way because seeing the end credits becomes such an important part of understand this. film.

I’ve often wondered what percentage of the audience actually sits down and watches the end credits without pulling out the record or leaving the theater. It must be very low, and that’s because a definite conclusion to the movie has usually already been shown on screen. No one cares who the gaffer or third assistant director is. But here, as we gaze at the images of the abandoned prison, empty buildings weathered by time and overgrown with unattended vegetation, the enormity of the task Papillon undertook, his quest for freedom, grows more and more in our minds. How many of us could match his zeal? The number is probably smaller than the number of us who sit through the end credits.

This is a film full of action and violence, which necessarily generates graphic scenes. But Schaffner also has an eye for the kind of more understated, nuanced scene that a lesser director wouldn’t think to line up. For example, in a scene showing the courtyard of the infamous prison, the camera opens with a small lizard sitting on the scorching roof of the building. A scene depicting a butterfly hunt pays close attention to the fluttering insects trying to avoid the nets. In a scene where the prisoners first arrive on the island, a pig is shown wallowing happily in the mud at the bottom left of the screen. And so.

But the final scenes I want to draw attention to here are devoid of people and animals and only show the various parts of the decrepit prison as a backdrop for the names of everyone involved in the making of the film while the haunting music of the Schaffner’s regular songwriter, Jerry Goldsmith, builds to a crescendo. The final effect on us is, of course, the contemplation of the nature of the very nature of time.. Time, these images and the accompanying music tell us, destroys everything. Sometimes the force of human will, Papillon’s in this case, can fight or stop it, but in the end the result is always a victory for time. And let’s not forget the crossbreeding of film and metafilm, which is, above all, one of Papillon’s most interesting features..

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