The whole world in a single film! A love story, an adventure film, a tale of passion on the high seas: Robert, a young Dane, is kidnapped from Marseille and taken, via Acapulco, to the South Seas, where — following patricide and maternal incest — he finds himself in a cannibal society that offers him a girl his own age. It is also a kind of oratorio: mildly moralizing dialogues and highly emotional scenes alternate with didactic texts and lyrical reflections.
Woven into the story is an anthology of industrial landscapes from England and California, conveying a sense of the power of human agency. Even Handel’s aspiration — “I should be sorry if I had only entertained my audience” — is not entirely overlooked.