Marguerite: A Reflection of Herself

by Dominique Auvray
First Run / Icarus Films, Brooklyn NY, 2002
VHS video, 61 minutes.  Color and black and white
Website: http://www.frif.com.

Reviewed by Aaris Sherin
Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa

aaris.sherin@uni.edu

Born in 1914 in Indochina (now Vietnam), the celebrated French novelist Marguerite Duras wrote more than 70 literary works (novels, plays and screenplays) and directed 19 films during a career that concluded just short of the end of the century. She was the screenwriter for Alain Resnais' New Wave classic Hiroshima Mon Amour (1960), but the single work that made her famous was The Lover (1984; English translation, 1985), an autobiographical novel that sold three million copies, has been translated into 40 languages, and won the Prix Goncourt, the prestigious French honor for fiction. In this engaging video portrait, filmmaker Dominique Auvray (a longtime friend of Duras, who also edited three of her films in the 1970s) juxtaposes snapshot photographs, home movie footage, television interviews, and brief extracts from Duras' films to arrive at a candid, inspiring view of her complex, productive life. The montage-like composite is especially fitting for Duras, because she almost always wrote as if she were of two minds (a participant and an observer), with the result that nearly all her work is personal and (at some level) autobiographical. As Duras' friend and co-creator, Auvray is well-prepared to mix film clips and interview excerpts with extracts from her writings to arrive at a vivid portrayal of a dimensional Marguerite Duras: writer, woman, mother, social activist, journalist, friend and filmmaker. Among the film's highlights are savory moments from interviews with an aging Duras, in which she is still vibrant and animated as she reflects on politics, past lovers, the art of writing, and her exotic childhood in Southeast Asia. It is evident that she is, and always has been, a woman who was indelibly changed by her daily experiences. Even in her seventies, her childhood and (much later in the 1950s) her affiliation at the Sorbonne with the famous Rue Saint-Benout group are still so vivid in her mind that even the thought of them moves her. One of the chief virtues of this film is a gracefulness and subtlety that is too often lacking in documentary profiles. Marguerite Duras is a particularly fascinating subject, and Dominique Auvray is a very capable filmmaker. As an exemplar of its genre (it won three major film awards in 2003), this film should be of value in a wide range of areas, including film criticism, womenęstudies, and modern literature.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review.)