All of these glowing reviews here on IMDb and yet no-one seems to be able to explain precisely what the film is about. On the face of it, it concerns a young sailor (Mathieu Carrière) and assorted relatives convening at Malpertuis, the home of soon-to-be-dead Uncle Cassavius (Orson Welles), for the reading of his will. The man's vast fortune is to divided amongst the family, but they will only inherit the money if they agree to stay within the confines of Malpertuis for the rest of their lives.
This sounds pretty straight forward, but let me tell you that the film is nothing of the sort: it's a baffling oddity with bizarre characters that rarely makes sense, and only gets more confusing as it progresses. By the end of the film, it is revealed that everyone in Malpertuis is actually an ancient Greek god trapped in a human body by Cassavius (that old chestnut). Or everything we have seen has been a dream. Or possibly it's all the hallucinations of a patient in a mental hospital. To be honest, I have absolutely no idea what was really going on towards the end, and I strongly suspect that those who say they love this film don't either.
Anyway, to cut a potentially long review short, I found the whole thing not just utterly confusing, but also extremely irritating. 2/10.
This sounds pretty straight forward, but let me tell you that the film is nothing of the sort: it's a baffling oddity with bizarre characters that rarely makes sense, and only gets more confusing as it progresses. By the end of the film, it is revealed that everyone in Malpertuis is actually an ancient Greek god trapped in a human body by Cassavius (that old chestnut). Or everything we have seen has been a dream. Or possibly it's all the hallucinations of a patient in a mental hospital. To be honest, I have absolutely no idea what was really going on towards the end, and I strongly suspect that those who say they love this film don't either.
Anyway, to cut a potentially long review short, I found the whole thing not just utterly confusing, but also extremely irritating. 2/10.