We already have Duras in an environment that will be common in others of her films, the beaches of the Normandy coast, the row of fin de siècle hotels. There are also other common themes in her films: the melodramatic story of lost loves, abandoned young girls, a dance in the invented spa town of S Thala, bicycles abandoned in tennis clubs, nostalgia, broken lives, a lot of mention of the memory...
It begins with two little voices whispering something about past loves, about a man who revisits the untraceable city of S Thala where an ephemeral love relationship developed. And we see a man heading to a lonely coastal hotel out of season. A lady dressed in an elegant black fur coat sees him arrive, as do two young men (one of them Gerard Depardieu). There is another melancholic young woman, also in a fur coat, who likes to spend time sitting on the sand with her gaze lost.
Duras talks about how they are two independent films, one with images and the other with dialogue, that the two young women who dialogue do not appear in the images, and that the characters who appear in the images do not know the young women who dialogue.
This is as disconcerting and objectionable as everything else in this film, and if the author intended it, it must be recognized that she makes every effort to make it difficult for the viewer to dissociate the two stories.
To begin with, because there is an obvious relationship between the images and the dialogue: the young women often faithfully describe the places, the characters and the looks between the characters in the images; The voices refer to the beach wanderers as beings who have lost their memories (or who remember memories that are outside, that are not theirs), something that these same wanderers affirm at the end of the film; They also speak of S Thala as the place where the hotel is, and both the wanderers and the traveler refer to the space of the images as S Thala (even the traveler in the letter to the wife). The voices refer to Richardson as the traitor lover who reappears in the story to remember past loves, and Gerard Depardieu addresses the salesman as Richardson.
The lady in the black fur coat hums an old song (which we will later learn that she does not know), typical of the years of the old love story. It is India Song, the same song that is hummed in the first images of the film, as soon as the traveler approaches the hotel. And then we hear it on the piano, the song that Richardson played in S Thala, the voices tell us.
While the voices recall the dance in which Richardson betrays the young woman by dancing with the woman who comes from the Ganges, we see Depardieu in a trance dancing that old melody and Sellers watching him desperately.
There is therefore an undeniable relationship, although the traveler may not be Richardson, nor may the wanderers be the protagonists of that past story that is the object of the dialogue between the voices, nor possibly do the images show us S Thala but another spa city (a sign at the entrance of the hotel refers to Deauville).
To make matters worse, halfway through the film the lady in black (Catherine Sellers) appears in an elegant red suit and begins to behave like the abandoned wife who has come with her two children to confront her husband. The traveler's wife, or the wife of Michael Richardson? And meanwhile the fire engine sirens go by because there seems to be a fire in the vicinity (caused by the wanderers to expel the wife and children?)
When it seems to us that we have unraveled something from these two stories, everything remains very simple: voices that refer to a love betrayed in S Thala many years ago, disembodied voices that we do not see and that we do not even believe are in S Thala , voices that apparently observe, as if enchanted, the wandering of some characters along the beach and the hotel of a Normandy spa town in the low season; while, in the images, the traveler who goes to that hotel to remember his loves (Michael Richardson or another man who also remembers other loves for an equally lost woman, who we only see in photographs) and gets away from his family, is stalked by wandering beings who have lost their memory and recovered an impersonal memory, memories of other people in other places, memories of that ancient couple to which the voices refer. The traveler himself, if not Michael Richardson, seems to fall into the spell by merging the memories of his own lost love, with the lost memories of that love in S Thala, and will respond like Michael Richardson to the greeting of the lady in the black coat who seems inhabit the memories of the abandoned young woman.
And it turns out that everything is part of a common imaginary in the work of Marguerite Duras, that this ball is a mythical moment in her work, narrated over and over again in her works, that Anne-Marie Stretter, Lola Valerie Stein, Michael Richardson are recurring characters, and that S Thala is her own invented setting for her novels, now a place of memories, a mental space in which the voices and characters of the images are lost, enchanted.
The dialogue of the voices develops in a languor that at times can be comical in its mannerisms. Duras has always liked those sweet voices, but they have never been as moving as Emmanuelle Riva in Hiroshima, mon amour. Here we have the magnificent Lebrun (La maman et la putain) and the unknown and almost catatonic Nicole Hiss who is sometimes almost an extreme parody of the Duras style of recitation, with her Oui? Je me rapelle...
The images of the beaches of Normandy and its abandoned hotels and spas, of some lost characters wandering on the shores, the slow pace, the general confusion until we can connect some ends, the presence of Catherine Sellers, the ingenious use of two overlapping narratives , make us forget the melodramatic nature and the almost non-existent content, and make this film possibly the most attractive of Duras' work.
But it is true that the film depends too much on the entire mythical world that Duras creates in part of his work, on his melodramatic love stories, on the knowledge of the world invented in the rest of his work.
For such a personal work, Duras collaborates with her husband (Dyonis Mascolo, who plays the traveler) and her son (who signs the cinematography). Furthermore, another of her regulars, Carlos d'Alessio, composed the song India song, which has fortune afterwards and Jeanne Moreau sung unforgettably.
For once an experiment that fascinates, bores, exasperates, surprises, but in the end is overall very attractive and unforgettable. Highest recommendation to start with this author's work, if you think it necessary.
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