la doleur (w&d emmanuel finkiel, w. marguerite duras)

La Doleur is a curious film. A big budget, glossy production, which is at the same time a literary mediation on the French experience of the second world war. The film is an adaptation of an autobiographical Marguerite Duras memoir, which describes her desperate wait for news of her husband, Robert, who has been captured by the Nazis. The first half of the film details a relationship with a French agent of the Gestapo, who claims to have information about Jean, but whose ulterior motive would appear to be his attraction for Duras. He invites her out for lunches at Nazi restaurants, as their relationship becomes more and more torturous and perverse. The agent, played with a dogged, lumpen charm by Benoît Magimel, is a curious figure, a compromised representative of a compromised France. This is when it feels as though Finkiel’s film is at its strongest, as it probes the divisions within French society which the war threw up. Those who threw their hand it with the invaders and those who resisted. Britain never had to face up to any latent fascism that may have underpinned society (the film made me think of the passage in Maclaren Ross’ Of Love and Hunger when he discusses the burghers of a South Coast town praising Hitler in the lead-up to the war), so the British war narrative has always been a less complex, more heroic one. La Douleur succeeds in capturing the stark duality of facing fascism: you’re either for it or against, there’s no middle ground. 

The second half of the film takes place following the war’s end, as Duras waits for news of Robert, who it emerges has been sent to a concentration camp. Here, the focus is on Duras’ emotional struggle to cope with the possibility of hope and the reality of loss. This provokes some grandstand acting on the part of Mélanie Thierry, although it feels as though the dramatic tension slips somewhat once Magimel’s character vanishes from the narrative. La Doleur has a stately feel. It’s the other side of the French coin. There’s no intellectual playfulness, rather a grand, emotional bagatelle, which seeks to pull off the trick of offering a cinematic depiction of a great writer’s inner thoughts. There are moments in its two hour duration when it feels as though the film is straining for effect, but there are others when it completely nails Duras’ inner turmoil and the cruel realities of living in wartime France.