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7 out of 12 people found the following comment useful :-
This movie makes my heart cave in!, 6 November 2000
10/10
Author: sleepsev (bearania@yahoo.com) from Bangkok, Thailand

Though I don't know anything about French social contexts during the 1960's and 1970's, though I haven't read any of Duras' works, though I can't figure out what is the message behind this movie, I still feel "Nathalie Granger" is one of the most beautiful films ever made. The beauty of "Nathalie Granger" doesn't come from its visual quality nor the objects it depicts, but from its serenity and the way things are represented. I have to quote the phrase "makes my heart cave in" from "American Beauty" to describe my feeling for this movie, because that's what I really feel, and the feeling I get from "Nathalie Granger" is in a way similar to the feeling I get from the dancing plastic bag scene in "American Beauty,"though "Nathalie Granger" is not didactic at all. As for me who don't understand any symbols hidden in "Nathalie Granger," the great sense of enjoyment I get from this movie comes from its sublimation of simple things and of domestic chores. Duras makes me look at simple things again in such amazement, such wonder, such astonishment of how beautiful they actually are.For me, the table cleaning scene is one of the greatest scenes in cinematic history. Though I might have seen people clearing tables a thousand times in my life, I still feel I have never seen anything like this scene before. Duras can capture the beauty and the charm of simple things into her film, and by representing them like something we have never seen before, she also captures the hearts of the audience. Another thing that impresses me a lot is the performance of Lucia Bose, especially in the scene with Gerard Depardieu. I like the expression on her face very much when she listens to the salesman. The radio broadcast about murderers at large is another thing that I like. There are also many other extraordinarily beautiful and calm scenes in this movie: the tearing up of paper, the piano playing, the characters' walking, the things that they do with leaves, and the shots of a baby carriage. I describe only my feelings here, not the meaning of this movie, because a few books have already deciphered it. Though I'm aware that the feeling I get might not be what Duras intended, I still feel very grateful for her for opening my eyes to see a wonderful kind of beauty, and for giving me a rare and precious sense of "nonconforming serenity."

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Elliptical . . you are invited to project into the gaps., 25 August 2009
9/10
Author: wkkbooks from United States

Elliptical . . you are invited to project into the gaps. I find an atmosphere of unbearable tension, depression, grief, apprehension,

watching two women living with some persistent post-traumatic stigma, unexplained, in a waiting that never ends. Something to do with the mother's unique, uncommunicable anguish over a very bad, violent, abnormal daughter. We never learn what she did or see her misbehave, we imagine the worst and her most innocent behavior seems unnerving, suggestive of evil. A double anguish, also having to do with a pair of depraved teenage boy killers on the loose in the neighborhood. Did they kill someone in the family? Or are they perhaps family members? Do the two women know something about these boys that the police don't? A numbed mood with its own rapturous nuances, separates them from the street world in front of the house, and the equally claustrophobic garden world in back of the house, the absolutely still house. Great actresses are denied the opportunity to act, a kind of negative violence which causes amazement and discomfort. By bizarre contrast, suddenly a radiant 24 year-old Depardieu, as an awkward vacuum cleaner salesman, gives a hilarious, virtuosic shaggy dog monologue out of Pinter or Beckett. Virtually his first film, it precedes his official filmography; what a discovery. The film goes nowhere, a fragment, a shard of smoky Durassian flint. The more Duras one already knows, the more one can appreciate this seemingly obscure and tedious film.

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1 out of 2 people found the following comment useful :-
It is very possible that your patience will not be rewarded with this nail biter., 12 August 2009
1/10
Author: plix flooberhausen from United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

First let me state that I am a huge fan of foreign cinema - have been for decades, so should you be dismayed by the comments that follow, write me off as a philistine at your own peril.

I chanced upon this movie and reading the back cover notes on the DVD: 'Nathalie Granger is an elliptical, elusory story about the world of women in which dull domestic ritual masks an undercurrent of lurking violence', I thought, OK, I'll take a chance. Though the director is also credited as the writer, there is decidedly more writing in the liner notes on the DVD. 'Dull domestic ritual?' If that includes repeatedly walking trance-like in and out of rooms (though sometimes it's just the room sans a life form) for no particular reason, staring off into the distance for interminable periods of time, a lack of what humans have come to know and embrace as conversation, so much so that it could be described as monasterial, the comatose deportment of all but 1 of the 7 characters, a cavernous void where a story might reside, well, then I'd say that the description hits the nail on the head - which I suppose, would account for the undercurrent of violence. Overall, the film lacks the sort of cohesion that would bind you to the experience, and comes across as a series of scenes without narrative or resolution of any kind. While I do appreciate minimalist cinema, this takes 'elusory' to as close to infinity as is possible with celluloid. So, if you are looking to for the kind of cinematic experience that is as riveting as staring at an unpainted wall, then this is your film! Though for me, I would like my 83 minutes back, please.

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2 out of 12 people found the following comment useful :-
The only sight for sore eyes is Jeanne Moreau washing dishes!, 20 January 2008
1/10
Author: stalker vogler from Xanadu

First of all I have to mention that I actually like minimalist movies, I like long takes and sparse dialogue, I like directors that rely the story-telling on the actors' charisma rather than on a very explicative script, and I like movies that emphasize the visual rather than the narrative aspect. But Nathalie Granger fails on every level: the script is virtually missing (it's as if it was stolen and the screenwriter died before shooting the movie), the acting is zero (the talents of Moreau and Depardieu are wasted on washing dishes and talking about washing machines), the editing and cinematography are trite but Duras did have the advantage of the location. Unfortunately the only thing to cling to for the desperate viewer is the furniture in the house and the beauty of the old French château, as it seems the directors' own home. The music score is probably intentionally annoying consisting of random practice bars on the piano.

As far as I have come to understand there is the premise of a story here: Nathalie is a very young girl who falls back on her piano lessons, probably from the bourgeois "fatigue" that was so criticized in the era. The shrink, or school director or whatever, tells her mother that she misbehaves in school and that if her piano lessons are interrupted she will have a lot to lose (actually the tone is gloomier, she says Nathalie is lost, in the sense of kaput, finis, dead and buried). But when you come to watch little Nathalie on screen she appears a very quiet girl, a bit sad and lonely but maybe this just happens because we are dealing with a minimalist film and the fact that she tips over a cart should be seen as an outward manifestation of atavistic rage...!

I really regret having spent an hour and a half on this piece of tedious self-indulgent mess that treats the brilliant Jeanne Moreau as a lonely "desperate housewife" with no name and makes the viewer think that even the cat had a better chance at showing its talents in another movie!

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