US premiere!
THE FATALIST
[O Fatalista]

This picaresque comedy is adapted form Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste et son Maitre and reset in modern-day Portugal. Tiago and his master carry on a debate about free will-Tiago denies its existence, even as he engages in ever more unpredictable and provocative behavior. Rogue and master careen across the countryside, from car wreck to bordello to their next adventure, in this entertaining and illuminating meta-fictional lark. A kind of missing cinematic link between 1960s classic THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT (Jan Potocki's novel was heavily inspired by Diderot) and Robert Bresson's LES DAMES DU BOIS DE BOULOGNE (whose plot was based on one of the story lines here).

DIR/SCR João Botelho; PROD Paulo Branco. Portugal/France, 2005, color, 99 min. In Portuguese with English subtitles. NOT RATED

Director João Botelho was born in Lamego, Portugal, in 1949. He comments on adapting Denis Diderot's novel:

"When [Robert] Bresson took a piece of Jacques, The Fatalist to make the sublime LES DAMMES DU DOIS DE BOULOGNE, he stated that Diderot's text was as powerful and magnificent as it was closed and treacherous. Bearing this in mind, I carried out a merciless struggle in order to steal other pieces of Jacques, The Fatalist and make a film for my own time and in which there could be the coexistence of soul, heart, brain and skin, for the love of the spectators, human like me."

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