Film

The Immortal Story

Name: The Immortal Story
Genre: Drama, Romance, TV Movie
Released: 1968
Cast: Jeanne Moreau, Orson Welles, Roger Coggio, Norman Eshley, Fernando Rey

Drama
Slow-burning

Orson Welles's only film adaptation of Isak Dinesen, a shimmering 58-minute chamber piece about an old merchant who decides to make a legend real. Shot in rich colour and told with dreamlike precision, it's a meditation on desire, storytelling, and whether bringing fiction to life destroys or completes it. Hypnotic and strange.

TMDb rating

3.6

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you love stories that turn on a single fable and the quiet cruelty of a rich man who believes he can write reality, shot with Welles's sense of shadow and theatre.

Skip it if you want momentum and plenty of incident; this is a slow, talky chamber piece with long stretches of stillness where very little seems to move.

What it asks of you: Fifty-eight minutes of patient, measured attention, with a formal, stagey rhythm and a mood that stays cool and melancholy rather than building to big emotional swings.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

The Magnificent Ambersons1942

Welles exploring the corrosive weight of time and the stories families tell themselves, with the same baroque visual intelligence and structural ambition. A masterpiece about decline and loss.

But It's 131 minutes of overlapping dialogue and shadow; the studio cut it severely and it can feel simultaneously dense and incomplete.

Ikebukuro West Gate Park2020

A Japanese series about memory, identity, and the stories we construct to make sense of chaos. Formally inventive, deeply strange, and it rewards attention the way Dinesen does.

But The plot is oblique and non-linear; if you need clear narrative throughlines, this will frustrate rather than enchant you.

L'Avventura1960

Antonioni's hypnotic exploration of desire, alienation, and the gap between what we want and what we find. Deliberately paced, visually gorgeous, it trusts you completely.

But Nothing *happens* in the conventional sense. It's a film about the texture of absence, which can feel like watching paint dry if you're not in the mood.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from The Immortal Story

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Godard's Passion1982

Both films are obsessed with the act of translation—how we move ideas from the imaginary to the real, and what breaks in that translation. Where Welles is elegant, Godard is violent about it.

Godard's fever dream about filmmaking, sex, and the impossibility of capturing desire on screen. A film about the gap between what we feel and what we can show—the exact inverse of Welles's merchant trying to make myth real.

But It's visually chaotic, structurally fractured, and openly hostile to narrative comfort. Some find it brilliant; others find it unwatchable.

Death in Venice1971

Visconti's operatic study of obsession and the stories we tell ourselves about beauty and desire. Luchino Visconti at peak visual extravagance; hypnotic and deeply unsettling.

But It's glacially paced and Thomas Mann is dense; the film assumes you're willing to sit with dread and longing for two hours.

The Fire Within1963

Bresson's quietly devastating portrait of a man trying to will himself back into living. Elliptical, precise, and infinitely human—it captures the space between desire and possibility.

But It's austere and heartbreaking. Bresson strips away sentiment entirely, which some find liberating and others find cold.

Mulholland Drive2001

Lynch's dream-logic meditation on storytelling, Hollywood, and the stories we construct to survive reality. Like *The Immortal Story*, it's about fiction bleeding into life until the seams disappear.

But It's deliberately non-linear and refuses to resolve; some viewers find that exhilarating and others find it maddening.

The Red Shoes1948

Powell and Pressburger's ballet-haunted masterpiece about desire and art colliding. Visually rapturous and structurally audacious, it understands the cost of living inside a story.

But The melodrama is operatic and sometimes overwrought; if you prefer subtlety, this will feel like being hit repeatedly with beauty.

La Jetée1962

A science-fiction poem told almost entirely in still images, about memory and the stories that haunt us. Melancholic, strange, and utterly original—proof that cinema can be made of almost anything.

But It's only 28 minutes and the narrative is spare; if you need plot, this is more like an art installation than a story.

The Leopard1963

Both are films about age, obsolescence, and the attempt to resurrect something that cannot be resurrected. But where the merchant in Dinesen acts, the Prince in Visconti watches.

Visconti's elegy for a dying world, about an aristocrat watching his power evaporate across a single day of balls and conversations. Painterly, melancholic, gorgeously composed—a meditation on time and irreversible change.

But It's 205 minutes of people in beautiful rooms talking about the past; the pacing is glacial and the action is almost entirely psychological.

A Ghost Story2017

Both films are interested in how a story becomes a haunting, and what it costs to be trapped inside someone else's narrative. Both are surprisingly short and infinitely strange.

A contemporary American film about time, haunting, and the stories objects hold. Shot in boxy Academy ratio, it feels like watching a fable; it has the same dreamy inevitability as *The Immortal Story* but in a completely different register.

But It's slow, repetitive, and aggressively unglamorous. If you need conventional narrative progression or character development, this will feel like punishment.