La douleur

War causes pain in many ways. La douleur focuses on one that usually goes unnoticed. It is a character study of Marguerite, a woman waiting for her husband who has been arrested by the Germans and nobody knows what happened to him. Is he alive? Is he dead? The only thing she can do is torturously wait without having any clue. She desperately tries to get a French agent's help, but deep inside she knows it's a vain attempt.

The movie succeeds in creating the surreal feeling of "freezing time". Days are endlessly passing by and she isn't living, she is just a detached observer. This effect is done through the extremely slow narrative, Melanie Thierry's performance, the camera work (e.g. Many closeups, or the scene where she looks herself in the mirror, an outsider in her own life).

I've watched some rubbish/flawed films and have found something to help me work around whatever was wrong with them. This film had nothing. It was slow, and boring. The characters weren't interesting me and I didn't like the cinematography. The overall look of the film was drab and grey.

"Memoir Of War" is a woman's picture in the true sense of the term. Women can understand the agony of waiting for their husband or other male relative to return from war, or in this case, from a concentration camp. Waiting and waiting and waiting - for some word, some hope, some encouragement. Daily trips to the train station provide no help as day after day goes by. Melanie Thierry is outstanding as Marguerite, who waits patiently for her husband to return. The war is over and she scans the returnees at the train station each day.

It is not a war picture in the strict sense of the term and there are no battle scenes, or even a fight worth mentioning. It is a character study ... but c'mon. Enough is enough. The film could have used a heavier hand in the cutting room, as it is about 30 minutes too long. I was beginning to hope he would show up dead or alive and end the interminable wait. I base my rating on the caliber of the acting performances, especially Ms. Thierry and Shulamit Adar, who plays a neighbor who comes to stay with her. But for these outstanding performances I would have opted for a six rating.

7/10 - Website no longer prints my star rating.

As usual, I am at odds with the idiots who inhabit places like Hollywood, and in their ignorance dare to review films of which they have little real understanding and a lot of subjective brouhaha! The film itself is a masterpiece of film making, which unfolds, like Sunset Song, the Scottish film of a few years back, in a thickly imaged, slow-paced narrative, the tormenting loss of a young woman's husband, the destruction of her youthful dreams due to war. We must remember that there is only one war, the war of the rich against the poor, the haves against the have-nots, the propertied against the vulnerable. The woman here is not simply any woman, of course, but Marguerite Duras, who was becoming on of the foremost novelists and screenwriters of the post war era, played to the hilt by Mlle Thierry who with this role comes into her own as of the foremost actresses of her generation. It's as good as Oldham's Churchill, that good. The detail of the film, not easy to achieve, is impeccable, every frame has been thought thru to the max. They deserved the Cannes for film editing with this one at the least. There is one frame, I really don't know how they achieved it, but I felt as if I was looking through a window in metal frame door, and not at the flat screen. I'd never seen anything quite like that. Again, at the end of one frame we hear what sounds like heavy breathing or crying, in the following frame we find that this is the sound of Duras' impassioned pen on the page. Utterly brilliant stuff. They had a great source and made a classic film with too many subtleties to recount here, especially to fans of an overpriced, horribly acted and written films like Bladerunner 2049 which are simply hyped junk with dependably high ratings on popular internet movie sites where folks speak depraved Hollywoodize.

The book isn't an easy read, it feels like being trapped into the author's head: this can be a problem because entering another person's subjectivity is always tricky and a source of misunderstanding.

The movie suffers from the same problem and this is why I didn't really like it. The voice over is extremely pervasive (we're bordering audiobook territory here) while nothing, or almost nothing, happens on screen.

In short, watching this movie without having read the book would be a pointless experience imho.