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Memoir of War

La douleur

2017

Emmanuel Finkiel

Mélanie Thierry, Benoît Magimel, Benjamin Biolay, Shulamit Adar ...

5.4

588

Drama When she finds two old notebooks in a forgotten box, writer 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 ... [+]

	Author	Review
United States	Guy Lodge Variety	"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"	NEU
United States	Neil Young The Hollywood Reporter	"Finkiel's chosen narrative structure feels distinctly lopsided (...) Thierry is utterly convincing and compelling from first to last"	NEU
United States	David Ehrlich IndieWire	"Mélanie Thierry is a brilliant Marguerite Duras (...) [A] compellingly austere adaptation"	POS
United Kingdom	Cath Clarke The Guardian	"[It] has the feel of an Audible audiobook reading. Duras’s soul-stripping words are here, but little thought appears to have gone into translating them for cinema (…) Rating: ★★ (out of 5)"	NEG
United States	Glenn Kenny The New York Times	"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."	NEU
United States	Richard Brody The New Yorker	"A generic, thoughtless adaptation of Marguerite Duras (...) [It] reduces colossal events to dramatic simplicities and trivializing shortcuts"	NEG
United States	Matt Fagerholm rogerebert.com	"Among its many notable achievements, 'Memoir of War' is one of the best films I’ve seen about the ways in which grief can pull a person in both directions simultaneously (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
Canada	Dustin Chang Screen Anarchy	"A harrowing tale of absence and shame (...) Skillfully directed and beautifully acted (...) Thierry is a revelation as Marguerite"	POS

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