This was the first version from which the film "Arthur Rimbaud, L'homme aux semelles de vent" (see below) was a developed remake twenty-four years later. The idea is to put the twelve years in Africa in parallel with the relationship between Verlaine and Rimbaud with the dream of the social revolution in the struggle of the Paris Commune in the background, whose bloody ending we don't see, but which is reduced to some easy communistic sentences, and above all to the rape of Rimbaud by three Commune supporters for whom being a revolutionary means raping young boys, affirming of course that a revolutionary must not be a virgin, which applies to the young boys, including Rimbaud, and not to them, the experienced revolutionaries. Rape seen as a revolutionary catechism for little boys who are still too naïve and uncorrupted.
The parallel, unfortunately, puts misery face to face with odiousness, exploitation with slavery, pain with suffering, etc. There is no choice in this society, on one side just like on the other we are in horror and sordidness.
It's a pity because it misses the beauty of Africa, the beauty of love, it's true, probably insane when invested between Verlaine and Rimbaud, a Verlaine who sacrifices everything for his love story with Rimbaud, and Rimbaud who finds nothing in this adventure lost even before starting, stoned with absinthe, befuddled with opium. It's really a real pity that everything is reduced to worthless dust that is not even a sandstorm.
Fortunately, the 1995 remake amplified the story, centered it on the African adventure and the end of Rimbaud in France, centered on the only real friendship he shared with Bardey, the chief trafficker of Aden who accompanied him, or rather was his final witness in the fifteen terminal minutes of his life in the shape of a fishtail, or should we say in the shape of a herring tail, his life that is nothing but a constant Severe Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo so obvious in his passage from life to death, turning his head to one side and then letting it go on the pillow and dying. And yet Rimbaud betrayed this friendship a hundred times, just as he got rid of his "African" wife, and just as he had only one partner in Africa, absolutely devoted and ready to die for him if he had asked him to do so, Djami, reduced in this film to a kid of maximum twelve years, whereas he was a teenager sufficiently advanced to be a man in Africa, beyond manhood rituals, fifteen or sixteen.
Don't linger too long on this film and move on to "L'homme aux semelles de vent" as quickly as possible. It is not here that you will hear the gnat fluttering in the hotel's pissoir like in the "Season in Hell", the real one, the poem.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
LAURENT MALET - JACQUES BONNAFFÉ - ARTHUR RIMBAUD, L'HOMME AUX SEMELLES DE VENT - 1995
It is a very beautiful film with the landscapes, the scenes of Africa in several regions, the cities, the oases, the desert, the mountains, the houses even, and the mix of populations, and even cultures. But the film is entirely centered on Arthur Rimbaud in the adventurous phase, more than adult, if Rimbaud was ever an adult, of the poet who is almost never there as a poet but only as a failed colonial trade negotiator. It is absolutely pathetic how each time he has a small profit that he reinvests in another business, he is cheated, stolen, and tricked like a five-year-old kid.
His loneliness is desolatingly sad. He has a wife there, but he ends up having to leave her because she doesn't want to follow him to Harare, too dangerous, too full of no promise except pain and suffering. She leaves him and he concludes the divorce by giving her a few coins of not much. Only one person will be attached to him, a young teenager of fifteen years, Djami, who recruits himself as his personal servant, but who will have to stay in Africa because only Rimbaud will leave by boat to France, to Marseille. Jacques Bonnaffé is the coffee or other products trader with whom Rimbaud will have a business relationship all along, during his stay in Africa, and it is him who will put him on a boat to go back to France and it is him who will put his hand on his chest in his hospital bed, just before he lets go his last breath. He was the last face Rimbaud saw before dying.
It is a film that shows with the maximum mental and intellectual violence all the colonialist ideology at the end of the 19th century, under the 3rd republic in France. The colonialism of the exploitation of the local populations that could make even the most hardened people shudder. It then becomes a denunciation of this crime against humanity with a strong genocidal and culturicidal dimension against all Africans, black or not black, Christian or Muslim, and several scenes show how the slave trade works very well to feed the harems and houses, closed or not, of the Arab world just a little further north. And the French, like the English and the Italians, and all the others sell arms to the various warlords, to the various tribal factions, because somehow the wars that follow nurture trade and make the populations on the verge of famine, starvation, and epidemics more exploitable.
But that aside, don't expect to hear a single line of poetry from Arthur Rimbaud and the lightning passage of Verlaine will only confirm the extreme exploitation that he imposed on Rimbaud who made him his universal poetic legatee, or who allowed this Verlaine to proclaim himself his universal poetic legatee.
But there is a certain beauty in the actors' play in exotic conditions often shocking, even when the director and his producers avoided any realism about Africa 150 years ago, including in the relationship between Rimbaud and Djami which was, and could only be, emotional, a strong attachment in both directions, totally shared including physically, of course.
Be romantic and nostalgic and discover the hidden face of this poet, one of the greatest French poets, much greater, I must say, than Verlaine.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU.
