Raoul Coutard and Pierre Schoendoerffer met in Indochina, where both had fought with the French forces and Coutard was a still photographer and combat reporter for Life and Paris Match. In 1956, Coutard shot Schoendoerffer's first film, La passe du diable. Twenty years later, the two teamed up again to adapt Schoendoerffer's novel Le Crabe Tambour to the screen. The film is a curious anomaly: a Joseph Conrad-like adventure in mythmaking, focusing on the enigmatic (and absent) figure of a French commander in the Indochinese and Algerian wars, Willsdorff, nicknamed Le Crabe Tambour. Having left the service after an aborted coup failed to hault de Gaulle's "abandonment" of Algeria in 1962, when the country finally gained independence, Willsdorff now reclusively crawls the North Atlantic in a fishing boat. Three French shipmates on a boat heading for Newfoundland-toward Willsdorff's moving hideaway-recall in a spiral of flashbacks their impressions of the eccentric hero, in the process divulging their own guilt, loss and disillusionment. The film is a veritable nostalgic paean to French colonialism, but critics are in agreement about one thing: Raoul Coutard's cinematography is nothing short of ravishing. It captures the eerie fog of the Mekong Delta, then the undulating movement of wintry seascapes, in such a way as to take this adventure yarn into another dimension altogether, that of art.