L'invenzione di Morel (1974) User Reviews

a surreal masterpiece

[daniel-charles2 · 10/10 · 7 May 2005]

Very few movies are as good as the book that inspired them. This one might be somewhat different from the idea I had from the book -the color whiter, the image flatter, but it remains a sort of cinematographic UFO which leaves a long lasting imprint of the memory -after all, this long-lasting imprint is what the film is all about. It looks like a low budget science fiction movie, while its the ultimate movie about love (like the book was the ultimate book about love). Haunting. A plus of the film is fascinating discourse of Morel, in surgical, clipped Italian sentences which make you rush to learn Italian. A unique film.

Has nobody seen this movie?

[fredericroyer · 29 December 2002]

***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** Has nobody seen this movie? I saw it on TV when I was a child, and since then I desperately try to find it on video. So, I bought the novel of Adolfo Bioy Casares, which led me to his universe and to his friend Jorge Luis Borges' books. In Morel's Invention, a castaway finds out that what he first thought was a desert island is full of people. Strangely, these people act and talk each day exactly how they acted and talked the day before. When the hero tries to talk to them, nobody pays attention. Nonetheless, he falls in love with a woman (though she doesn't pay attention to him neither). He finally discovers that these people are all dead and just part of a big "3D movie", captured by a "camera" invented by a scientist called Morel. The "movie" reruns again and again each and everyday, as the energy of the "projector" comes from the tide. As the hero can't escape from the island, he decides to incorporate himself in the movie, before committing suicide. So, he will be virtually alive with his loved one until the end of time...

Morel, a character out of the system

[tzillo · 10/10 · 25 December 2000]

As the president of the jury "La Giuria" i can say that this is one of the best movies ever done. The director Emidio Greco is a genius, and his image is reflected in the character of Morel, a man completely out of the system, a cool pragmatic inventor, i don't say more because who read this comment must see the film without knowing other details. Don't miss this movie, if you don't like usual diagrams, because it makes you reflect about all life's sides, and vanity of life. The director Emidio Greco from behind the camera gives us lessons about the life, we can't miss them...

Draws on a classic cinematic proposition...

[philosopherjack · 24 June 2019]

If one didn't know Emidio Greco's L'invenzione di Morel was based on a novel, it might easily be taken as a response to Tarkovsky's then-recent Solaris - although not set in space, its isolated island setting amounts to much the same thing, and the plotlines are similar in their blurring of the line between humanity and illusion, and in the related capacity for cinematic metaphor. With tweaking and a much-souped-up visual style, Greco's film could also feel like the forerunner of a Black Mirror installment. A man is washed up on the island, his boat wrecked beyond repair (there's little backstory beyond a passing reference to political problems) - the island holds a large structure that's part museum shell and part industrial complex but initially seems uninhabited, but then he starts to see people, dancing and conversing with little attention paid to their challenged surroundings, and with none at all paid to him (the most striking among them is played by Anna Karina, who even more than in most of her post-Godard work is utilized here as pure image). The film is strikingly composed and edited, often wordless for long stretches, at others dense with exposition and self-interpretation as the title's Morel, gradually revealed as dominant among these dispossessed individuals, reveals his invention, and the place of the others within it. As noted, the film draws on a classic cinematic proposition, of the screen and the spectator's submission to it as a rewriting of and usurpation of reality - in this respect, it necessarily belongs to a time of cinema as physical destination, long predating the tyranny of tiny screens. It's not the most galvanizing of works - there's no respect really in which Greco is as interesting as Tarkovsky, and the film does skirt turgidity at times - but it has an elemental enigmatic power, and deserves better than its substantially forgotten status (an ironic fate perhaps, given its premise).