Memoir of War (La Douleur)

Directed by Emmanuel Finkiel (2017)

Featured in the Boston Jewish Film Festival’s Summer Cinemateque

This beautifully wrought adaptation of Marguerite Duras’s war memoir, with Mélanie Thierry playing Duras, explores the human mind when waiting day after day, month after month, year after year, for news of a family member deported to a Nazi concentration camp. When the war ends, the waiting goes on, as trains bring back survivors but never the loved one.

This debilitating state of waiting happens to the protagonist Marguerite, who waits for her husband Robert, arrested for his resistance activities. It also happens to Mrs. Katz, boarding with Marguerite, who waits for her handicapped daughter, even after she learns the Nazis sadistically eliminated “cripples.”

Marguerite keeps a diary of her mental state while waiting for Robert, and her surreal feelings, verging on madness and spoken in voice-over, parallel the camera’s imagery, which blurs with illusion, delusion, and hallucination. The background music becomes cacophonous, and we the audience physically experience the mind’s demise into disconnection to the living world, as a result of unmitigated waiting and fear. The film’s crowning achievement is how the camera, sound, and scripting mirror the person’s interior world when severed from reality and relationships. The long silences with just Marguerite’s face on the screen (always smoking in deep reflection), convey the depth of her psychic pain, which includes fear for her own life. Many observations about the war and anti-Semitism intersperse the film, as well as a plot involving a French cop working for the Germans, but the film’s poetic essence is its study of human emotions.

One small criticism: the film’s ending comes as a jolt and lacks clarity, particularly when Marguerite’s earlier, delirious vision of a newborn baby reemerges as a truth in the final scene and without adequate explanation. Additionally, when Marguerite tells Robert (who barely survives Dachau) that “I want a divorce, I want Dionys baby, nothing has changed in two years,” more confusion arises. All through the movie Marguerite’s been waiting for Robert’s return—it’s the entire study of the movie—although we do wonder at times about her relationship to Dionys, a fellow resistance worker. So, to hear her say she wants a divorce and Dionys baby, and nothing has changed in two years, suggests that before Robert was dragged off to Dachau, Marguerite wanted a divorce in order to be with Dionys. This muddled ending doesn’t quite fit the story we’ve been so deeply a part of—waiting with Marguerite for her beloved Robert to survive the war. It may be that Duras’s memoir sheds light on these last details.