Films by Marguerite Duras
Duras’ narcissism–she often speaks her own texts during the films–has been held against her, yet it seems to be every bit as germane to her art as the purely physical narcissism of John Wayne, Cary Grant, and Toshiro Mifune. This narcissism is evident whenever one hears her reciting her own prose, which happens in at least four of the Duras-directed features showing at Facets. (It’s been too long since I’ve seen Les enfants for me to recall if she speaks in that film, but her voice can be clearly heard at the other end of a telephone in Nathalie Granger, offscreen in India Song and Agatha, and triumphantly on-screen and off in Le camion.) When I met this short, formidable woman about 15 years ago in New York, what impressed me most her was her Brahman-like relaxation and pleasure in her own strength and authority, partially expressed in the warmth and economy of her phrases. The fact that she’s attracted a mass audience with some of her fiction (most famously The Lover, the only one of her novels I’ve read) and persuaded many of the best actors in France (including Gerard Depardieu, Daniel Gelin, Michel Lonsdale, Jeanne Moreau, Delphine Seyrig, and Bulle Ogier) to star in her marginal independent movies must be galling to some of her avant-garde competitors. Some people even peevishly try to use her commercial success to discredit her Marxism. Of course women as sure of themselves as Duras are bound to be viewed with suspicion and perceived as troublemakers.
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No doubt this is an oversimplification of a complex and far-ranging literary movement. But if one considers the colonial background and sexual obsessions of Alain Robbe-Grillet (the “new novelist” who scripted Resnais’ second New Wave feature, Last Year at Marienbad) and the importance of the German occupation to Jean Cayrol (the new novelist who scripted Resnais’ third feature, Muriel, as well as a short about the concentration camps, Night and Fog), this supposedly formalist movement begins to take on a certain ideological shape. The hero and narrator of Cayrol’s novel Foreign Bodies, for example, is both a compulsive liar and a former Nazi collaborator, so the periodic deconstruction of the narrative that occurs whenever he exposes his own lies to the reader might be said to correspond to the moral and spiritual deterioration of French citizens during the Occupation.
