So you have to make some compromises when you want to put this on the screen.
Marguerite duras the war full#
In her book she treats Dionys almost like a ghost character who’s hovering over, but she never really gives him a full body, she never gives him a reality, and she emphasizes her behavior almost as the ideal wife. They lived together as a couple under the same roof, and both of them were waiting for the return of Robert Antelme. She lived with Dionys Mascolo long before her husband was deported. When you do this research, you find out that Marguerite Duras was a big liar. Because what the audience is looking at on the screen is a journal, I really had to do research beforehand to find out what the reality was, because film is supposed to film what’s real. That would have substantially changed the ending of the film.ĭT: How did you go about choosing which details to include, to create not only the story but also the psychological space?ĮF: I did begin working with the text by Marguerite Duras, but I always had in my mind, like seeing in the rearview mirror of a car, a biography of Duras, and specifically the biography written by Laura Adler. Antelme agreed to Marguerite’s having a child with Dionys, her lover in fact, Marguerite, Antelme and Dionys all lived together, and Antelme actually published Dionys’ book. For instance, she and her husband, Robert Antelme, had a child who died at birth. Director Talk recently spoke with director Emmanuel Finkiel.ĭirector Talk: I understand that the film is an adaptation of La Douleur, not a biopic of Marguerite Duras, but you left out a number of important details about Duras’ life. The film stars Mélanie Thierry as Duras, Benoît Magimel as Rabier, the French policeman who has the power to connect Marguerite with her husband, Benjamin Biolay as Duras’ lover, and Shulamit Adar as her neighbor’s mother, Madame Katz. Based on her memoir of this period, both personal and historical, Memoir of War brilliantly defies cinematic convention to convey the emotional space of active expectation. In 1944, Duras began a long wait for his return home. Everything is simultaneous."I feel a slight regret at having failed to die while still living.The Gestapo deported Marguerite Duras’ husband to Dachau for his role in the Resistance. Human experience becomes one dimensional. But in wartime there is only one plane of human experience. Maybe the war divides us, divides our experience, so that we can talk about the missing cheese in the same sentence as we talk about the death of a traitor (as they do in one of the later chapters here).ĭeath and cheese, Duras understood, normally existed on different planes of human experience. At the edge and not at the edge at the same time. To affect a reader in that way requires going to a different place inside of oneself after much silence, quite separate from the edge of experience that is experienced while in the midst of experiencing the edge of experience.ĭuras was able to do that seemingly in the moment. Part of the reason this is impressive is that to go to the very edge of emotional experience is an entirely different beast than to write out that experience on paper. And just because there's no point in killing him, we can go ahead and do it."She goes to the very edge of emotional experience and is somehow able to write about it almost as it was going on, and it doesn't turn out like an overly emotional teenager's drivel (I just realized after I wrote this that it may be read as a subtle criticism of Anne Frank, but it's not intended that way, I haven't read her since high school, so can't speak on that front). And there's no longer any point in letting him live. In fact with the opposite of sentimentality."There's no point in killing him. She says it all in here without falling into the typical trappings of saying it all about such a subject. Or rather, there is too much to say that I never know where to begin.īesides Marguerite said it all already in this book. Part of the reason for my lapse is that there is never anything to say about war. Perhaps being brave is my form of cowardice."I just realized that I have not reviewed this book yet. "Not for a second do I see the need to be brave.