Papillon a movie about brotherhood
Remake of cult classic is a fact-based tale that’s worth retelling
In our contemporary insipid remake culture, one’s first reaction might be to grimace at the thought of updating the 1973 Steve McQueen classic “Papillon,” a film which was not particularly well-received by critics upon its initial release but which has since solidified into a cult classic, much to the masculine bravado and timeless cool of its star.
While Hollywood continues to tack on mediocre addendums to formerly mediocre franchises (one need only look to the most overrated of these, the “Star Wars” films) naturally, one might expect Michael Noer’s refashioning of this epic true story of a prison break in South America to follow suit.
However, it is the enduring appeal of “Papillon”’s human drama, that of the resilience of the human spirit and the quest for authentic freedom which makes this story worth retelling.
Based on Henri (Papillon) Charrière’s 1969 autobiography of the same name, the film presents an account of Charrière’s miraculous escape from the notorious Devil’s Island penal colony in French Guyana in 1941 with the help of another convict, a counterfeiter by the name of Louis Degas (played by “Mr. Robot”’s Rami Malek, soon slated to appear in the role of Freddy Mercury in the anticipated biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody”).
Falsely convicted of the mur-
der of a pimp in Paris in 1931, Charrière’s final escape in 1941 following a series of failed attempts punished with almost a decade of torturous solitary confinement would seal his freedom for the rest of his life. After resettling in Venezuela in 1945, Charrière would live there until 1969 when he would finally return to France following the publication of his massively successful memoir which sold over 1.5 million copies in the nation alone. Following an extended vacation at the top of the bestseller list, he was finally pardoned for murder in 1970, only three years before his death from throat cancer at age 66.
While many of the details of Charrière’s death-defying escape on a raft fashioned from coconuts and burlap are indeed true, he also acknowledged that much of the story was embellished, stating that roughly 75 per cent of the book was accurate, a claim which historians suggest is likely closer