The beginning of Les Derniers Jours du monde only hints at the strange voyage that is to come. We are introduced to a man attaching a prosthetic device to the stump of one of his arms. Robinson (Mathieu Amalric), appropriately named as we will soon discover, is on vacation in Biarritz with his wife. What follows is the story behind the loss of his arm, a story that becomes increasingly bizarre and eventually apocalyptic, leading us down a narrative path of labyrinthine complexity. The resulting film is an extraordinary feat of imagination and daring, set against the backdrop of a world on the verge of destruction.
Seamlessly mingling past and present, a strategy that only adds to the unsettling effect of the film, the Larrieu brothers follow Robinson's uncanny voyage. Falling madly in love with a tall, thin Spanish girl named Laetitia (Omahyra Mota), Robinson is soon obsessed, balancing his married life with the exciting electricity of this new affair. While Laetitia is beautiful, she is also elusive, and as quickly as she enters his life, one day she simply vanishes.
Back in Biarritz, scanning the vacationers on the beach, he imagines he sees her, triggering a renewed passion. Meanwhile, an environmental emergency erupts on the streets of the fashionable resort, the prelude to events that intensify into disaster. Determined to find Laetitia, Robinson sets off in pursuit only to be met by increasing disorder as the world plummets into catastrophe.
Intriguingly, Les Derniers Jours du monde keeps the calamity well in the background, employing radio reports and a few perfectly imagined scenes of chaos to hint at the scale of what is happening. The film is ultimately a hypnotic study of one man's amorous obsession for an anonymous stranger, but in this simple tale, the Larrieus find the seeds of the end of the world. Amalric has never been better, yet the hallucinogenic atmosphere the filmmakers surround him with is as much the core of the film as his character's search for the love of his life.
Piers Handling
Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu are French screenwriters and directors. The brothers have made many films together, including the features
Fin d'été (99),
La Brèche de Roland (00),
Un homme, un vrai (03),
Peindre ou faire l'amour (05),
Le Voyage aux Pyrénées (08) and
Les Derniers Jours du monde (09).