Memoir of War

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5.3

366

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Original title

La douleuraka

AKA

Memoir of War

Year

2017

Running time

127 min.

Country

France

Director

Emmanuel Finkiel

Screenwriter

Emmanuel Finkiel (Novel: Marguerite Duras)

Cinematography

Alexis Kavyrchine

Cast

Mélanie Thierry, Benoît Magimel, Benjamin Biolay, Shulamit Adar, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet, Emmanuel Bourdieu, Elsa Amiel, Anne-Lise Heimburger, Patrick Lizana, Joanna Grudzinska, Caroline Ducey, Salomé Richard, Bertrand Schefer, François Prodromidès, Stanislas Nordey

Producer

Co-production France-Belgium-Switzerland; Cinéfrance 1888 / Les Films du Poisson / KNM / Versus Production / France 3 Cinéma / Need Productions / Same Player / Proximus

Genre

Drama | Biography. 1940s. Nazism

Movie Groups

Marguerite Duras' Adaptations

Synopsis / Plot

When she finds two old notebooks in a forgotten box, Marguerite Duras remembers her past and the unbearable pain of waiting. In the 1944 Nazi-occupied France, the young and brilliant author is an active Resistance member with her husband Robert Antelme. When he is deported by the Gestapo, she throws herself into a desperate struggle to get him back. She develops a chilling relationship with local Vichy collaborator Rabier and takes terrible risks to save Robert, playing a cat-and-mouse game of unpredictable meetings all over Paris. Does he really want to help her? Or is he trying to dig up information about the anti-Nazi underground movement? Finally the war ends and camp victims return, an excruciating period for her, a long and silent agony after the chaos of the Liberation of Paris. But she continues to wait, bound to the torment of absence even beyond hope.

Awards: 2018: César Awards: 8 Nominations inc. Best Film & Director

2017: San Sebastian Film Festival: Official selection

Critics' reviews

"The film is most artful as an interior evocation of a preemptively grieving state of mind. If, at over two hours, it is an undeniably onerous watch"

Guy Lodge: Variety
"Finkiel's chosen narrative structure feels distinctly lopsided (...) Thierry is utterly convincing and compelling from first to last"

Neil Young: The Hollywood Reporter
"Mélanie Thierry is a brilliant Marguerite Duras (...) [A] compellingly austere adaptation"

David Ehrlich: IndieWire
"Thierry plays Marguerite with an understatement that can be enigmatic, seductive, or deliberately confounding. The picture as a whole doesn’t do justice to her committed performance."

Glenn Kenny: The New York Times
"A generic, thoughtless adaptation of Marguerite Duras (...) [It] reduces colossal events to dramatic simplicities and trivializing shortcuts"

Richard Brody: The New Yorker
"A harrowing tale of absence and shame (...) Skillfully directed and beautifully acted (...) Thierry is a revelation as Marguerite"

Dustin Chang: Screen Anarchy

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