Love is a
strange and many splendored thing. Sometimes it comes with a flash of light and
a clap of thunder, engulfing us all in an instant. But sometimes it sneaks up
on us quietly taking us over so gently we don’t even realise until we have been
completely engulfed. This film crept up on me exactly in this way. I started
off watching it almost out of a sense of duty – it’s a known classic and I felt
as if I should have watched it by now – and for the first hour or so honestly
wasn’t that hooked. I ended up deciding that my first tattoo will be the
butterfly that gave the film it’s name – the butterfly tattooed on the main
character’s chest. I have the pain threshold of a slug when it comes to needles
(terrified doesn’t scratch the surface of how they make me feel as anyone who
has tried to take blood from me can testify) so this is really something. Allow
me to endeavour to explain how.
The film is
based on the memoires of the same name of Henri “Papillon” Charriere, a petty criminal native to France. Convicted
(all his life he claimed wrongly) of killing a pimp, he is sent to the penal
colony in French Guyana. This is a dismal place where the prisoners are treated
little better than animals and the more unruly ones (like Charriere) are kept
in solitary confinement for years ( that’s “years”, plural) so that they are
“broken” (and often killed). Of course it’s completely possible to get yourself
into trouble even in solitary confinement in which case you are deprived from
light for up to six months… As you can imagine, Charriere is not an easy prisoner
by a long shot. Two things keep him alive and (relatively) sane: his friend
Dega who is a renowned forger and a man of means who can make *ehm* connections
even in this most dismal of jails and his dogged obsession with escaping. The
trouble is that this place is specifically designed so, as the guard so
succinctly puts it, France can “wash her hands” of the men and dispose of them.
For ever. It is going to take one hell of a lot more than determination for
Papillon to escape…
You may
have made the analogy already. And to tell the truth, yes, in places the film has that distinct feel one
gets from “escape from POW camps” type tales that were so popular around the
time of the 2nd World War. You know, completely disparate characters
pulling together against a common brutal enemy and almost impossible odds. The
fact that we have Steve McQueen (who was the lead in The Great Escape ten years
before this film was made) in the title role does nothing to alleviate this
analogy. Of course genre-wise, it’s your basic buddy-movie really. The strong
decisive “masculine” one (Steve McQueen) and the more effeminate, “scaredy” one
who “gets things done” aka Dustin Hoffman as Dega. Technically the film is
brilliant in so many ways. One of my particular favourites was that beautiful
if slightly jarring contrast between the paradise island of French Guyana and
the brutality of the colony. And to me, to be absolutely honest, this film
stuck out with its story, more than anything else…
First of
all, a tiny bit of research straight away proved what I strongly suspected: it
is widely presumed that the stories Charriere tells as his life story partly
come from other prisoners. You could very well argue that the story is a bit
like a swashbuckling pirate story. And I do not mean that in a disrespectful
way. It’s just one of those things where when you look at the list of
misfortunes that befalls the hero, it is almost numerically impossible for one
single person to be THAT unfortunate. But then again, I don’t think the fact
that it didn’t happen to a single person detracts from their force –
considering they were probably true. I’m pretty sure 6 month blackouts happened
as did solitary confinement for years on end along with God knows what else
besides… I mean these stories are unbelievable,
but the truth often is stranger than fiction…
And
secondly, just because an event is based on reality but doesn’t match up to it
100% must we, in every single case, wag our fingers and dismiss it because it’s
not “telling the truth”? This is a story about the amazing capacity human
beings have to find inner strength and keep up hope. And shall I tell you
something else? I don’t even think it’s that important whether Papillon made it
to freedom or not… (SPOILER ALERT!) What
matters is, when he is put on Devil’s Island – a minimum security branch of the
colony where the prisoners are pretty much left to their own devices on a tiny
island surrounded by shark- infested waters and nowhere to launch a boat from
Papillon, who is now old and grey and not a little insane after 5 extra years
in solitary confinement, STILL hasn’t given up. While Degas (who has somehow
landed himself on the same island) is happy to settle in and concentrate on
growing carrots, Papillon is still plotting… Now call it obsession or madness
if you will, I think Papillon’s tireless bids for freedom speaks to something
in all of us. You know. The part that secretly “knows” that one day you will be
famous. You will be rich. You will have that red Ferrari. The entire world may
be telling you that that plan, whatever it is, is very probably going to end in
heartache. Outwardly you agree. Inwardly, there is a tiny voice inside
insistently telling you to keep plugging at it. Papillon is the story of a man
who never, never lost that voice. And I think this is a far more important
message than any other the film may or could contain.
I mean,
look at it this way. As I write this review, Holocaust Remembrance day is
almost upon us. I just finished watching a documentary about British Holocaust
Survivors. They site a lot of different “ingredients” for survival in those
most horrific times, blind luck being one. But the second? Optimism. A sense of
humour. And if that doesn’t tell you something about what it takes to survive
in this world, I don’t know what will…
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