Shown side-by-side with The 317th Platoon, Le Crabe Tambour, also based on a novel by Schoendoerffer, is a curious anomaly-a Joseph Conrad-like adventure in mythmaking that has been received as a veritable nostalgic paean to French colonialism. Perhaps the two films will shed new light on one another. The film tells of 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 halt de Gaulle's "abandonment" of Algeria in 1962, Willsdorff now reclusively crawls the North Atlantic in a fishing boat. Three French shipmates on a boat heading toward The Crab's moving hideaway recall in a spiral of flashbacks their impressions of the eccentric hero, in the process divulging their own sense of guilt, loss and disillusionment. Critics are in agreement about one thing: Coutard's cinematography ravishingly captures everything from the fog of the Mekong Delta to the wintry seascapes of Newfoundland, taking this adventure yarn into another dimension altogether.