Captain Achab

Epic biopic about Captain Ahab, inspired by the literary classic Moby Dick. Ahab thinks he can give his life meaning by conquering the whale considered unconquerable. It turns into a barren journey with a dramatic ending.

Philippe Ramos made a short film with the title Capitaine Achab in 2003. Now, four years later, he brings us a full-length feature about the tragic captain from the classic Moby Dick, regarded by many as unfilmable. Ramos does not follow the narrative line of Herman Melville unquestioningly. On the contrary, his film is primarily a biography of Achab, told from the perspective of five different characters, of whom he himself introduced four. Only the last part relates in any way to the novel.

The five different narrators tell in voice-overs about their experiences with young Achab, growing up in the film in the forest with a grumpy father (Jean-François Stévenin), and the later idiosyncratic and ambitious sailor (Denis Lavant). Ramos has convincingly portrayed the historic setting of 19th-century New England and sketches the codes of behaviour within the socially-charged encounters of his characters as an opulent painter with the precision of a travelling portrait photographer. Achab remains all that time a loner, thrown back on himself, filled with burning ambition, on his way to an inevitable end. Ramos makes this ending even more explicit as he allows the captain, who had in the book already started a more or less suicidal undertaking against the white whale, to consciously seek out death. In retrospect, this ending gives his life even more dramatic loneliness. –IFFR