Marguerite Duras is having a conversation with Gerard Depardieu about a film she intends to shoot, whose script she is holding in her hands. That movie is Le camion. This relaxed conversation alternates with long shots of landscape images shot from the truck window, taking advantage of Beethoven's Diabelli variations to give the viewer something to enjoy.
Marguerite pretends to know what she's talking about and looks up as if telling Gerard what she's thinking, but obviously it's not that at all, because mid-sentence she has to glance at the page she's holding, or shamelessly start reading. Of course, she says each sentence delighting in her creativity as if she were devising the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
The script she is reading is ridiculous, uninteresting, a delirious conversation between a trucker and a hitchhiker woman about the origin and end of the world, about the universe, about the proletariat; but Gerard Depardie is forced to say again and again I see, and put on a face of understanding or athat of someone experiencing an epiphany with each enigmatic outburst from Duras.
The film seems conceived, written and made in a couple of hours. That is not serious because obviously it has cost nothing: neither money nor effort. I guess Gerard Depardieu would participate for free, because he has nothing to do either, not even learn a script, since like Duras, he reads directly from some pages in front of him. I suppose that in those years he would find it a prestigious project, because the pedantry of this writer was very much in vogue. Even today, Duras is highly regarded in certain pseudo-intellectual leftwing circles.
Pulling on its literary prestige, she always had great names in French cinema acting in her otherwise unbearable films, and it is always interesting to see Jeanne Moreau or Delphine Seyring, even if they do nothing more than wander in front of the camera. When she wants to give her films more packaging, she also hires cinemagraphers like Sacha Vierny.
In Cannes Le camion was a scandal, and Duras seems to have had to endure insults. Terrible, this woman did no harm to anyone filming Le camion: I don't think she needed subsidies to make this film, I don't think anyone was fooled by promoting it as an action film...anyone who entered the cinema could expect what they would find.
We also have to thank her for never shooting that script she had planned: a shooting that, as she herself says, would be fast, cheap, in black and white. I suppose that, aware of the little interest that the film would have had, she chose to do something that seemed more metafictional or I don't know what nonsense. To make it clear that none of the images would correspond to that unshot film, what we see is in color.
