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Détruire dit-elle More at IMDbPro »

4 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
Cold summer, 25 October 2010

Author: oOgiandujaOo from United Kingdom

I had some idea that this was a Marguerite Duras version of Last Year in Marienbad early on in the film. After all the characters we see are in an existential limbo, a comfort zone, staying in a hotel in the countryside that seems to be outside things somehow. There is the Marienbad feel initially that the characters need to break out by a supreme effort, that they need to have the will to love. They are perhaps Beckettian slouches, avoiding the local forest although they constantly resolve to go there; why go into the forest when we can stay in the park they reason. There definitely is that going on but I think so much more as well.

Further into the film you can start to feel similarities to David Cronenberg's wonderful early movie Stereo (incidentally released in the same year). In that movie volunteers in a blank deserted modernist university have brain surgery to remove their ability to speak but increase their power for telepathy. Some characters in the experiment are dominant and control the others, some resist the melding, but a group identity is formed, hideously psychosexual. In this movie you feel that the inhabitants of the hotel are undergoing the same process. Stein is the master, Alissa his Stradivarius, Elisabeth a psychological weakling, becoming a golem, Max Thor Stein's henchman. At one point Elisabeth's husband arrives and all four of the main characters refer to themselves as German Jews, Stein is in them all. Amongst many merging references is the beautiful line that Stein delivers on the subject of Max and Alissa sleeping together every night, "one day they'll find the two of you shapeless, clotted like tar" The location to go into more detail is a hotel absent of staff, absent of the outside. There is a beautiful grove outside where white sun-loungers are thinly spaced out on the daisy-strewn grass, where white cast-iron chairs with backs made of symmetrical curlicues poise. Max and Stein have a conversation at the start of the movie, "What season is it?" "Cold Summer". That sums up the feel of the place. Another point is that there are no children, this is actually reminiscent of another masterpiece Jens Lien's 2006 movie The Bothersome Man, where the lack is the difference between a world with flavour and no flavour.

After a while the movie becomes very stylised, the shots are static and really close up, the scenes conversational. It took me a little while to realise that what's going on is that I was becoming a hotel resident, being enveloped by the scenes, joining the group. The effect is quite overpowering, I felt like reaching out and touching Max's blazer, like kissing Alissa (I have never felt that way in a movie). During a card game I actually felt like I was holding a hand.

Alissa (Nicole Hiss) is so strange, described as having the hair of a child, with a bearing both uncertain and yet sure at the same time, like a Delphic Pythoness. A tactile women who in a key scene has parted lips through which no words emit.

The ending has more than a hint of Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). It is no coincidence that this film raises the spectre of so many others brilliant ones.

To keep the mood going after the film is over I recommend playing Charles Ives' "The Unanswered Question".

This played to a very sparse audience at the Institut Francais' Cine Lumiere in London on 25 October 2010.

1 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
"Anything is possible", 20 July 2011

Author: sveinpa

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

I find Detruire dit-elle to lack much of the quality of great films directed by Duras, like Nathalie Granger and India song, but still think it interesting enough to see some times and write a few words about. Perhaps it is its more static feel, stressing a little bit too much that this is a play we are watching, that stops it from being a true cinematic experience. The current print is not very good either, but then the cinematography is also no more than adequate, as if it was a production for TV.

We are presented with a vast hotel and its garden with desolate chairs spread around. There is also a tennis court. Around the garden is the wood, which we only see from a distance but still hear its birds. The entire film consists of conversations between four people, five in the final scenes. Sometimes they talk right outside the hotel, sometimes right inside it. Of the interiors of the deserted hotel we do not see much, and of the surroundings nothing although we are told that there is a beautiful spot nearby. Not even the characters manage to see the spot. They all seem to be waiting or in desire of something, as so are we. This may produce some discontent. We are always denied any sort of visual pleasure, expect for watching the characters speak. So what remains to get our attention is the rather complex dialogue, both off screen and on screen. What of it?

It seems to me that the discussions all circle around a game of storytelling. As in India Song, there are first two women commenting the "action" off screen. After a while, when the women are on screen, we hear the men comment. This puts the on screen dialogue in a sort of paranoid position, it is constantly overheard by the off screen voices. The men may speak about love, the women may speak about fear but all the time they are making up little stories for themselves, and for us. It seems that they are waiting also for something terrible, a destruction of sorts, to be brought about by the young. Well then, anything to pass the time. What the stories are about may not be of much interest but the way they go about telling them is.

The two men, both "german Jews"(when is this taking place?), are literary inclined, Stein is, in his own words, "in the process of becoming a writer", and Max Thor is a professor in French, also, according to his young wife Alissa, in a similar writing process. The two starts a strange cooperation: We are told by one of the off screen voices that "Max Thor writes what Stein watches". But we do not see this. So what do we trust, our eyes or our ears? Neither I guess but this is the kind of game I find interesting. We can say "this is not really happening" or "I do not believe what I hear or what I see" but the film is still there. If we play the game we have to see it. It gets a little cruel perhaps, especially towards the older, nervous Elizabeth who is waiting for her man, but she does not seem to mind; in fact she likes it. And I like it too. I like the way the rhythm is slowly working, never cutting scenes too fast but letting the characters rather soft and hesitant voices take effect. They never shout. These may be worried people but the way they worry is rather pleasant to witness, if I may say so.

There are also for our entertainment some, if rather basic, tricks with mirrors and with cards along that way that almost elevates the play into a film of sorts: When points of view shift, the stage at least is benefited by multiple ways of seeing. But mostly it is the talking that does it. Multiple talking, perhaps, but handled with great taste. From the little I have read about the films of Duras, it is the priority of the sound that is most discussed. The way it often is out of synch with what we see. Here there is not any sounds present which we cannot locate by what we see, just the birds and sound of the men playing tennis, but the sound of the voices still does their tricks with us. I find I listen to the voices the way I often, lazy, listen to music, as a sensory experience, without thinking too much about what I hear. The contrast for example between the whispering, lush voice of Alissa, playfully courting Stein; "Stein, mon amour" and his dry, matter of fact response, I find both hilarious and heartfelt, as if they are only playing, but that the playing of it makes it real.

The play gets a little out of hand when Elizabeth's husband Bernard arrives, as he is at first clearly unable to play by the "rules"; he is an alien figure in the play. When Alissa says that they have been very interested in his wife, he first gets upset but then when he learns that the interest was purely "for literary reasons", he is completely bewildered. He claims he does not read novels anymore, because they have ceased to be "stories". He is clearly the odd man out. And when Alissa simply says "Destroy", he is completely lost. But when Stein repeats "She said 'destroy'", Bernard looks like he suddenly is accepting the play, as he mutters "Anything is possible", says he wants to stay but then takes his wife and leaves.

And? The end is dark and surprising. Not to be told, so see (hear) for yourself.

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