Houellebecq Should Stick to Books

From the Independent:

Several film critics walked out of a showing of the first full-length film written and directed by Houellebecq at the 61st Locarno movie festival. Others giggled or made rude remarks.

Houellebecq, perhaps sensing a hostile audience or perhaps just unpredictable as usual, failed to turn up for a press conference. He also failed to say a few words to introduce his movie as festival etiquette demands.

His film “La Possibilité d’une île” (The Possibility of an Island) was dubbed by the Swiss newspaper Le Temps as “the possibility of a shipwreck”. The French newspaper Le Figaro said that the advance showing of the much-awaited movie, which opens in France in September, had “turned into a farce”. [. . .]

Most of the movie appears to have been filmed in a quarry (actually on location in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands). The costumes, characters and gadgets resemble those from a science fiction B movie from the 1950s or an early black and white episode of Doctor Who. The desultory action takes place against a sound-track mostly taken from Ravel’s “Bolero”.