Made in 1965, “Les Îles Enchantées” was a commercial flop and for many years it was difficult to find, before being restore and put back into circulation. Based on a story by Herman Melville, this film by Carlos Villardebó does not fit into any genre, it is a singular and original film, with profound "literary" content and narrated in the past tense. The film is very well directed and does justice to the masterpiece in which it is based. Everything happens between reality and imagination ("I am going to tell a story that many won't believe") as if the story being told, in which there is very little dialogue, was a dream or hallucination. All the action consists in waiting and is marked by a strange encounter on an isolated island. The soundtrack, by Philippe Arthuys, a musician from what in the 1950s and 1960s was called concrete music, is sparse and mixes in a complex manner recognizable musical sounds and various noises, not always decipherable. The most unusual aspect of the film may be the presence of Amália Rodrigues, shown in a manner that is the exact opposite of her Fado diva image: Amália hardly speaks, evidently does not sing and acts in an almost solemn manner. She emerges as an austere and mysterious figure and Villardebó is able to capture the strength of her presence in memorable close-ups of her face. Amália Rodrigues makes Pierre Clémenti’s appearance in “Les Îles Enchantées” truly remarkable, as very few people would find a connection between the two artists, who belong to two totally different worlds. This was Clémenti’s fifth film, he was 23 years old (his previous film was Il Gattopardo, by Visconti, playing Burt Lancaster’s son). In “Les Îles Enchantées” we see Clémenti before becoming Clémenti, two years before Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, the film that would define the dark and intense beauty he would bring to cinema. For all this, “Les Îles Enchantées” is a film that deserves to be (re)discovered. Antonio Rodrigues