The Million, 1979 

The Million
A journey among the carnivals of different cultures, from India to Bali, from Japan to Brazil, from Africa to European ballroom dancing. A "musical" à la Odin: a mocking album of exoticism whose figures of flesh and blood prance about in front of a strange traveller, clad like a missionary, with the spectacles of a short-sighted intellectual and the backpack of a tourist.
The spectacularity and the candid joy of the opening scenes slowly reveal their opposites: dismay at the brutality which accompanies the explosions of life, the misfortunes which encompass the carnivals on the outskirts of empires, the exploitation and humiliation of women, the children with no future.
This exotic album becomes one of meditation reduced to its essentials: love, abandonment, old age, death. For the civilised traveller who is intimidated and vulnerable, the journey becomes escape, distance, involuntary cynicism. A procession of the Magi sings a lullaby to the skeleton of a child: "In a doorway in Bethlehem/ The Virgin and Saint Joseph...".
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