Akerman’s penultimate film was her final brush with narrative and only her second literary adaptation. After taking on the elasticity of Proust with The Captive, the director turned to the trenchant political prose of Joseph Conrad for Almayer’s Folly, finding in the author’s eponymous antihero a man acutely and tragically cognizant of the passing of time and the long-term effects of his own misjudged actions. Never one to limit her focus, however, Akerman pays equal attention to the white colonialist’s mixed-race daughter, who finally attempts to escape her loving but controlling patriarch in one of the film’s several sublime examples of long-take choreography. In migrating the tale from Conrad’s 19th century French Indochina to 1950s Malaysia, Akerman is able to tie one man’s gradual recognition of his own greed to the larger collapse of European empire, while also gaining richly atmospheric environments in which to film, from the clammy, neon-lit underbelly of riverfront port city Phnom Penh to the overgrown jungle where Almayer holes up in anticipation of riches. Dean Martin songs and Mozart movements waft through this thick, humid atmosphere, providing a fitting sense of cultural displacement to this dark, pitiless meditation on the existential dead end of imperialism.