Cet Amour-là is an intimate portrait of a legendary love affair. Set against the beauty of the Breton seaside, it is also a film that revels in the insights that Marguerite Duras' writing ...
See full summary »
Eliane adopts Camille, whose Vietnamese parents were friends. In 1930, a French navy officer is interested in Eliane (owns 60km2 plantation) and later in Camille. There's an uprising in Vietnam against French colonial power.
Director:
Régis Wargnier
Stars:
Catherine Deneuve,
Vincent Perez,
Linh Dan Pham
This art film has no conventional dialog between the main characters. This tells a strangely compelling story of two women in a suburban home who are listening to radio news broadcasts about a missing child in their area.
In this most talky and personal of films, director Marguerite Duras and actor Gerard Depardieu do an on-camera read-through of a movie script. Occasionally, the director comments about the ... See full summary »
A man returns to the places where he lived a passionate love with a woman who has died today. The sensation he feels is so strong that he imagines that she is still alive.
Director:
Marguerite Duras
Stars:
Catherine Sellers,
Christian Baltauss,
Gérard Depardieu
A dialogue-driven drama about a woman and her brother who meet at a deserted seaside hotel to deal with their passionate incestuous feelings for each other and reminisce about their happy childhood.
In response to a new friend's queries, Vera recounts her life, starting with her no-good husband Jean, who has been using her to keep his failing building business afloat - up to the present affair she's having with Cayre (Depardieu).
Each night in Paris, hundreds of men and women anonymously use telephone lines that date from the German Occupation and are no longer listed to talk to each other, to love each other.
Director:
Marguerite Duras
Stars:
Dominique Sanda,
Bulle Ogier,
Mathieu Carrière
7 year-old boy Ernesto intrigues people around him for several reasons. Despite such a young age, he looks like a man on his 40's and also seems a little more intelligent than any of his ... See full summary »
Director:
Marguerite Duras
Stars:
Axel Bogousslavsky,
Daniel Gélin,
Tatiana Moukhine
Cet Amour-là is an intimate portrait of a legendary love affair. Set against the beauty of the Breton seaside, it is also a film that revels in the insights that Marguerite Duras' writing affords.Written by
Anonymous
Only France I suspect could produce a fascinating, self-absorbed, libertine, brilliant woman intellectual like Marguerite Duras whose long relationship with a very young and callow Yann Andrea is the subject of director Josee Dayan's "Cet Amour-la."
Born in 1914 in a Vietnam firmly under French control, the young Duras absorbed the often silent influences of the lush and exotic land that she often referenced, in writing and conversation, during her very long life in France. Her first important writings came out during World War II, a difficult time for Duras and her family under the German occupation that saw relatives incarcerated in concentration camps including her husband. He survived - others didn't.
Hardly surprisingly, Duras - always committed to examining social issues - flirted with and joined the French communist party after her country was liberated by the U.S. With a few other intellectuals who brought a brilliant honesty to their view of life she abandoned the false prophets after about five years. She always, however, mirrored issues of social justice through the prism of her writings which largely reflected her own experiences and values.
The belle of a postwar literary establishment that offered avant-garde writing to a country that in two world wars had seen demographic decimation and international humiliation, Duras tackled every theme and every subject while pursuing a somewhat hedonistic lifestyle (including a very celebrated menage-a-trois). By the time she met Yann, such exploits were interred in the mists of her memory.
Based on Yann Andrea's novel, the film starts with his meeting Duras after long writing to her, poetically expressing his admiration (and, undoubtedly, ambition to follow in her literary footsteps). Played by Aymeric Demarigny, the young (in his twenties) Yann is invited to Duras's apartment by the seaside.
A mutual attraction develops as Duras, in a role only Jeanne Moreau could bring to life, accepts the young man as her muse, amanuensis and lover. He moves in. As a couple, they argue, make up and often engage in whimsical pursuits (her attempt to teach him to drive, for example) in which the generational gap melts away. This was no short relationship - the couple was together from 1980 to Duras's 1986 death.
In the film and perhaps in real life (this is, after all, the surviving lover's tale of a relationship of near mythical proportions in literary circles) Yann brings certain gifts that spur the aging author's writing. Unfortunately he also brings bottles of red wine which set the alcoholic Duras back into the drinking she apparently had escaped from earlier.
An affair between a woman in her eighth decade and a man in his third - an American film would highlight exploitation, perhaps sex served up as bizarre. With actresses in their thirties now appealing to directors to find roles for "older" women it's doubtful many film makers here could portray a relationship such as Yann and Duras's with unflinching honesty, subordinating the sexual aspects to the more interesting core interdependence that Jeanne Moreau gives life to here.
Demarigny's excellent portrayal notwithstanding, this is Moreau's film, a triumphant demonstration of the depths of her acting AND a statement about her own innate vitality and sexuality. She must care deeply about Duras.
A slow moving film that will reward second viewings, it isn't for everyone. Duras isn't that widely read in the U.S. and I suspect many won't even recognize her name. Still, the intimate and often rambunctious Duras/Andrea relationship can stand independent of any knowledge of the protagonists' real lives.
Nicely filmed in a verdant France.
8/10.
10 of 11 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful to you?
| Report this
Only France I suspect could produce a fascinating, self-absorbed, libertine, brilliant woman intellectual like Marguerite Duras whose long relationship with a very young and callow Yann Andrea is the subject of director Josee Dayan's "Cet Amour-la."
Born in 1914 in a Vietnam firmly under French control, the young Duras absorbed the often silent influences of the lush and exotic land that she often referenced, in writing and conversation, during her very long life in France. Her first important writings came out during World War II, a difficult time for Duras and her family under the German occupation that saw relatives incarcerated in concentration camps including her husband. He survived - others didn't.
Hardly surprisingly, Duras - always committed to examining social issues - flirted with and joined the French communist party after her country was liberated by the U.S. With a few other intellectuals who brought a brilliant honesty to their view of life she abandoned the false prophets after about five years. She always, however, mirrored issues of social justice through the prism of her writings which largely reflected her own experiences and values.
The belle of a postwar literary establishment that offered avant-garde writing to a country that in two world wars had seen demographic decimation and international humiliation, Duras tackled every theme and every subject while pursuing a somewhat hedonistic lifestyle (including a very celebrated menage-a-trois). By the time she met Yann, such exploits were interred in the mists of her memory.
Based on Yann Andrea's novel, the film starts with his meeting Duras after long writing to her, poetically expressing his admiration (and, undoubtedly, ambition to follow in her literary footsteps). Played by Aymeric Demarigny, the young (in his twenties) Yann is invited to Duras's apartment by the seaside.
A mutual attraction develops as Duras, in a role only Jeanne Moreau could bring to life, accepts the young man as her muse, amanuensis and lover. He moves in. As a couple, they argue, make up and often engage in whimsical pursuits (her attempt to teach him to drive, for example) in which the generational gap melts away. This was no short relationship - the couple was together from 1980 to Duras's 1986 death.
In the film and perhaps in real life (this is, after all, the surviving lover's tale of a relationship of near mythical proportions in literary circles) Yann brings certain gifts that spur the aging author's writing. Unfortunately he also brings bottles of red wine which set the alcoholic Duras back into the drinking she apparently had escaped from earlier.
An affair between a woman in her eighth decade and a man in his third - an American film would highlight exploitation, perhaps sex served up as bizarre. With actresses in their thirties now appealing to directors to find roles for "older" women it's doubtful many film makers here could portray a relationship such as Yann and Duras's with unflinching honesty, subordinating the sexual aspects to the more interesting core interdependence that Jeanne Moreau gives life to here.
Demarigny's excellent portrayal notwithstanding, this is Moreau's film, a triumphant demonstration of the depths of her acting AND a statement about her own innate vitality and sexuality. She must care deeply about Duras.
A slow moving film that will reward second viewings, it isn't for everyone. Duras isn't that widely read in the U.S. and I suspect many won't even recognize her name. Still, the intimate and often rambunctious Duras/Andrea relationship can stand independent of any knowledge of the protagonists' real lives.
Nicely filmed in a verdant France.
8/10.