FRANCE:HE HAS been labelled a sex-obsessed nihilist, a middle-aged misogynist and an Islamophobe with a rotten moral core.
But Michel Houellebecq may have just suffered the most hurtful jibe of all: he has been called boring.
Critics at the Locarno film festival have given the author's cinematic debut - an adaptation of one of his own novels - a resounding thumbs-down after the movie was savaged for its flat dialogue, confusing plot and unwelcome dose of sentimentality.
There wasn't even, they cried, much sex.
"This film is of a quite exemplary tedium," declared the Corriere della Sera'scritic, Maurizio Porro.
"It is not the slightest bit involving . . . and is sadly lacking not only in substance but also in basic narrative structure. [It is] hard to make poetry out of confusion."
The weekend press screening of The Possibility of an Island, due for general release in September, was punctuated throughout by sniggering and occasional belly laughs from the critics present.
Brigitte Baudin, from Le Figaro, wrote that some journalists even left before the end, proclaiming the film both "catastrophic" and "ridiculous".
"Michel Houellebecq is hotly debated by literary critics," Baudin said. "But he will undoubtedly be massacred by the film critics."
If the journalists at Locarno were less than receptive to Houellebecq's first directorial offering, however, it may have been because the notoriously mercurial novelist had piqued their pride earlier in the day by calling off a press conference and even refusing to give a brief introduction to his film, as is the tradition.
No official reason was given for the cancellation but there was immediate speculation that Houellebecq had been made nervous by predictions in Paris that The Possibility of an Islandwas going to be "the flop of the season".
- (Guardian service)