A Shock Even For Duras Fans!
dwingrove
A huge let-down to audiences at the time, Marguerite Duras' follow-up to her lush and flamboyant India Song is a very different film indeed. Telling the story…
A huge let-down to audiences at the time, Marguerite Duras' follow-up to her lush and flamboyant India Song is a very different film indeed. Telling the story of two tragic lovers who never meet (the girl is dying of leukemia and daren't risk face-to-face contact) Duras sets out to communicate this 'faceless' relationship to her audience by - and you really won't believe this unless you see it - barely even photographing the glamorous trio of actors she has hired to star. So if your notion of sheer cinematic bliss is gazing raptly at Mathieu Carriere or Dominique Sanda (OK, I admit it, mine is) then be warned that Le Navire Night may give you a nasty shock. Long motionless takes of the three actors having their make-up put on or wandering - barely visible - round shadowy rooms. For most of the film, the camera pans along deserted Parisian boulevards, or pores over a luscious red dress hanging on a wall. At the end, Duras announces in voiceover that "the story was never shot." True, on a purely literal level. Yet the sense of frustrated longing that sustains both non-lovers through their passionate non-affair...if we don't experience that through the methods Duras uses here, why not? Are we incapable of feeling unless we are prompted by the prescribed visual image? Or are we (as Susan Sontag feared) so saturated by images that we can no longer feel at all? To try and put it more simply, why is Marguerite Duras' way of telling this story any less valid than the conventional techniques that we, as a film audience, expect and demand? Our answer to that question says little about Duras and her film, and everything about us. Why do we feel the need to reduce an emotional tragedy to a visual image? Is it morally acceptable for a film to do that? At once a negation of cinema as it is, and a reaffirmation of what cinema might be, Le Navire Night is a film to be watched with heart and mind and senses wide open. Or not watched at all.
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★ 10 / 10
Separated love
oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx
Here we have Marguerite Duras' film or anti-cinema of a relationship between a man and a woman who relate to one another over a telephone line. Why…
Here we have Marguerite Duras' film or anti-cinema of a relationship between a man and a woman who relate to one another over a telephone line. Why anti-cinema, well Duras wants the images to happen in your mind more than on the screen. This is why she gives us "images passe-partout", mostly landscape shots or shots of people thinking, which you could layer many narratives on top, which you have to use as a springboard. We also should have to conjure up the conversations of the pair, we are given only a fragmentary idea of what they talk about. What do two people who fall in love over the telephone talk about? The juvenile in me says phone sex, but I think that's not the point here; this is about souls reaching out across the void.
It's a distraught film, full of desire. Pierre Lhomme's photography and Duras' work bring to life the friezes and statues of Paris so that you're almost in the state the sculptors must have been in. More, you tend to feel the unbridgeable distance between each sculpture.
Conventional thinking says that we ought to forget the desires which we cannot consummate, that we ought not to listen to the cries in the nights of the other abandoned souls, we ought to focus on practical love, on achievement in material wealth, in temporal activities. In the world of Duras however there exists only the anguish of souls' unslaked desire for others. For this reason many revile her, whilst many others exult her, and in the middle a legion of those simply confused by the experimental nature of her movies.
What gets in the way of the two lovers, a leukaemia, which in large part feels metaphorical, and a patriarch, the enormously wealthy and influential father of F.
Occasional flashes of political thought are judiciously added, Duras speaks derisively of the inhabitants of the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, Napoleonic bankers and generals - selfish complotters, puppeteers. The world they have created one where love is seeded on rocky ground.
What lingers long after, is the hypnosis of Duras' voice, black tulip lamps, black cast iron park benches, a tumult of feeling, the dancing violin of Amy Flamer.
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80%
AUDIENCE
6.5/10
402
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Hard encoded subtitles. :( WHY? :( It's hard to load a subtitle, they must be hard-coded? :(