Burke Does the Continent

Although a brand-new movie adaptation of James Lee Burke’s 1993 novel, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead--his sixth to feature Louisiana detective Dave Robicheaux--is headed straight to DVD/Blue Ray in the United States, Europe appears to have embraced this film more generously. As Reuters notes, “In the Electric Mist has its world premiere at the Berlin film festival on Saturday, where it is in the main competition.” The news service adds that recent history along the America’s Gulf Coast forced changes on Burke’s original tale:

French director Bertrand Tavernier transports the action to more recent times, incorporating Hurricane Katrina into the narrative and including images of areas of New Orleans still devastated by the effects of the 2005 disaster. ... “It seemed to me that it was completely dumb to come to Louisiana and to shoot the novel written at the beginning of the 1990s and not put in Katrina,” Tavernier told reporters after a press screening. “Right from the beginning I knew that I was going to update the story,” the 67-year-old added. John Goodman, who plays mobster Julie “Baby Feet” Balboni, said Katrina was something impossible to avoid. “Katrina’s been a fact of life since August 29th three-and-a-half years and ago and it’s just something we live with now,” he said. “It’s like a mountain that forced its way up out of the swamp. It’s just something that’s there and it will always be there for years and years. It’s just a way of life now.”

However, the bones of Burke’s plot remain in the movie:

[Robicheaux, played by Tommy Lee Jones] is haunted by his failings but has a moral sense that means he stops at nothing to catch the culprit. In The Electric Mist, he senses that a series of brutal murders of young women may be linked to a crime he witnessed 40 years earlier, underlining a central theme--that you cannot escape from your past.

In the Electric Mist is due for DVD release in the States on March 3. READ MORE: “Guess Who’s Not Coming to Dinner?,” by Geoffrey Macnab (The Guardian); “Photos from In the Electric Mist,” by Jeremy Lynch (Crimespree Cinema); “Unelectrifying Mist,” by Corey Wilde (The Drowning Machine).