Ecrire

As in La mort du jeune aviateur anglais, Benoit Jacquot films his friend Marguerite Duras talking, which is an event in and of itself – her girlish hair, her hunched intentness, her elegance, her piercing conversational style (every utterance is a precisely conveyed, reverberating thought), her great sad eyes. And this time, the talk is of writing – the act of writing, the loneliness, the magnificence, the madness, the night of writing. At one wonderful moment, Duras dismisses most of modern literature with the simple observation that most of the books she reads ‘don’t have enough night in them’ (on the other hand, there’s plenty of it in Michelet, who sends her into a rapture – ‘Michelet, Michelet, Michelet!’). The ‘night’ of the book, the ‘night’ of writing the book in her own house, a far more disturbing and less reassuring presence than Virginia Woolf’s room. Far more than simply an illustrated guide to Duras’ final book, Jacquot places his own measured cinematic voice in perfect harmony with Duras’ memory of the ‘madness’ of writing. (KJ)