Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

The disappointingly dull adaptation of Albert Camus's' The Plague (1992 adapted and directed by Luis Puenzo (The Official Story, The Old Gringo) returned William Hurt and Raúl Julia to Argentina (this time,actually shot there). As in "Kiss of the Spider Woman" (1985), Julia was again better, and this time was more flamboyant than Hurt.

Hurt played an affectless but dedicated doctor (named Bernard Rieux, but with no attempt to seem French) fighting an outbreak of bubonic plague (updated to 199_ and relocated from Algeria to a generic South American city that is still called Oran), Julia a cynical operator (named Cottard, also with no attempt to seem French). As a French journalist, Martine Rambert, Sandrine Bonnaire (who looks and sounds French with no effort, because she is French) is far worse than Hurt, though presumably she did not write her part that is a total distraction from any of the points of Camus's reflections. Robert Duvall (as Joseph Grand, a man who supposedly has never left the South American city) also wanders through a few scenes, adding nothing, and Jean-Marc Barr (playing a French tv cameraman on assignment with Martine, named Jean Tarrou ,who volunteers to aid) attempts to Learn from Suffering as the plague comes, kills many, and stops... but will return.

Except for retaining some character names, Hurt intoning some of Camus's words in voice-over at the beginning and end, and there being a plague about, nothing from Camus's novel survives the adaptation, not even the characteristics of the plague itself (though that was widely considered to be a metaphor by the Nazi occupation of France rather than the foreground or even background of the doctor persevering in easing the suffering of dying plague victims). Neither Hurt nor Duvall are plausibly Latin (South American or French). Raúl Julia is plausibly South American, though the name "Cottard" is not.

Perfunctory romance (the flailing Martine trying to seduce the melancholy Dr. Rieux), female nudity (Bonnaire's and that of some corpses), and a shoot-out were added, the points of the book about Life and Death (and fascism) lost in transit to the screen. There is a notable lack of panic or of retreating from public contact. There is not even any reaction when a female tango dancer goes permanently limp in a packed night club, or when Bonnaire faints during a tendentious sermon in a packed church. People may be insensitive to the suffering of others, but in my observation (including being in an epicenter of AIDS deaths) many try magical means to insulate themselves from contamination (widely understood to include proximity to the afflicted). Some would shrug at these women dropping, but others would flee. (Bonnaire's character does try to flee the quarantined city, but I mean panicked flight from public deaths.)

The movie shows (again) that striking visuals are not enough, especially with hackneyed musical emphases. (The musical score is not credited to (or blamed on?) anyone.) Their work in giving the movie a dark, urban look being the only impressive aspects of the movie (though some would add Bonnaire's exposed breasts), Argentine cinematographer Félix Monti (who also filmed "The Official Story") and Argentine art director Juan Carlos Diana deserve to be singled out for praise. They make the Oran they fashioned out of building and vistas of Buenos Aires an interesting (though intentionally uninviting) series of locations for Dr. Rieux and Jean Tarrou to pass through, trying to ease suffering.

The movie is plodding with a 105 minute running time. It's hard to imagine sitting through another version that is 35 minutes longer. Except in the character given Julia to play, incoherence is not the movie's problem. Leaden dialogue, cheap melodrama, and dreary characters are its insoluble problems.


Recommended: No

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age

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