In the second, set immediately after the Liberation of Paris, the increasingly withdrawn Marguerite waits for her morally compromising efforts to bear fruit, Antelme’s survival seeming an ever more remote possibility as scores of the formerly imprisoned return to Paris without him.įinkiel subtly muddles the timeline between these two stages, underscoring the alienating effects of loneliness and mourning on the young writer, though they’re otherwise distinct in tone and focus.
Marguerite duras the war series#
In the first, set in the final weeks of the German occupation, the intrepid Marguerite embarks on a fraught, queasily flirtatious relationship with Nazi collaborator Rabier (Benoit Magimel), agreeing to a series of covert meetings in exchange for information about her deported husband’s whereabouts. While taking on only a portion of the book, “Memoir of War” intelligently approximates its difficult, shifting structure, in which senses of time, place and character are frequently clouded - while making it clear why others had hitherto resisted filming a work primarily about the dramatic and spiritual lacunae of waiting.įinkiel has primarily built his film from two of “The War: A Memoir’s” six parts. Much of her distinctively poetic literary tone survives into Finkiel’s narration-heavy screenplay and Mélanie Thierry’s intensely contained lead performance, even if some of the book’s more controversial theoretical musings (in particular, her conception of the Holocaust as “a crime committed by everyone”) have been tempered. Perhaps the film’s most formidable feat as an adaptation is a double-edged one.
In France, it carries the more evocative title “ La Douleur” (directly translated as “pain”), as does Finkiel’s film, though one questions the wisdom of retitling it “Memoir of War” for English-language viewers: Commercially unenticing on its own terms, the new moniker also risks escaping the notice of the book’s acolytes.įor it is Duras devotees who remain the principal audience for the film - like all Finkiel’s work to date, a more secure prospect domestically than abroad, though international distribution should follow in due course. The harrowing uncertainty of her separation from then-husband Robert Antelme - detained and sent to Dachau concentration camp during the Nazi occupation of France for his involvement in the Resistance - may have been its throughline, but the book skitters restlessly to more generalized meditations on the nature of war, heroism and the shared burden of the Holocaust on its surviving victims and perpetrators alike. Writers who stayed in Paris during the war spoke of it as a quiet city – all bustle and street life silenced – but veteran director Emmanuel Finkiel takes that too far here, muffling the fury and anguish of the book.Published in 1985, though drawn from diaries written over 40 years before, “The War: A Memoir” is a form-blurring work that addressed Duras’s emotionally exhausting World War II experience through the thinnest of fictional filters. In voiceover, Duras says that at every one of her meetings with Rabier she is petrified she will be killed. Still, Thierry’s performance feels constricted and inscrutable – as if she’s been directed to do “inner turmoil”. There is real fire in Thierry’s portrayal of Duras’s magnificent contempt for this minnow and the other French collaborators who drink expensive wine with the Gestapo, fingers in their ears to the turning tide of the war. Rabier, a jumped up little man with artistic pretensions, is attracted to Duras and summons her daily to bars and cafes, assuring her that he has given orders that her husband not be tortured. The action then switches to a year earlier, and Duras’s cat-and-mouse relationship with French police agent Pierre Rabier (Benoît Magimel), who arrested him. The film opens in 1945, towards the end of the war, as chainsmoking Duras awaits news of her husband, a French resistance activist deported to a concentration camp by the Nazis.
Mélanie Thierry does her best in the lead as Duras, but her character is maddeningly flat and dull. Duras’s soul-stripping words are here, but little thought appears to have gone into translating them for cinema. T his over-polite adaptation of the French writer Marguerite Duras’s semi-autobiographical book (published in 1985 as La Douleur) about life in occupied Paris during the second world war has the feel of an Audible audiobook reading.
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