Cet amour-là (2001) - film review

For five years, a young university student, Yann Andréa, has been corresponding with the legendary writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras.  In 1980, he finally bottles up the courage to pay her a visit at her home on the Brittany coast.  From that first meeting, the twenty year old student and the sixty-five year old writer share a relationship which will last right up until Duras’ death in 1996...

Cet amour-là offers a poignant depiction of a seemingly impossible love affair between the literary giant Marguerite Duras and a gauche student young enough to be her grandson.  The unconventional subject of the film should be shocking but director Josée Dayan’s portrayal of the unlikely relationship is a thing of beauty, poetry and irony, redolent of much of Duras’ great works.  The simple cinematographic style serves the film well, allowing the spectator to be absorbed by the unfolding relationship between the story’s two main protagonists.

The film tacitly avoids the physical side of the relationship between Duras and her young lover and focuses on the emotional and intellectual side.  This is probably for the best (for artistic reasons, and also out of respect for Duras)  but it does prevent us from appreciating the true nature of the love between Duras and Andréa, which the former described as a "scandalous passion".   Lust was unquestionably a part of their mutual attraction but what we are shown is an idealised view of the affair - attractive, humanist, but a tad sanitised.    This highlights the film’s only real flaw – Dayan’s approach is too conventional, too risk-averse for the film to feel totally sincere and realistic.  Even Duras’ descent into dementia and death is treated with ponderous caution.  Surely the writer’s suffering over this period was much greater than what we are shown?

Whilst it is easy to fault the film, the same cannot be said of its lead actress.   Probably no one in the world is better suited to portray Duras on screen than Jeanne Moreau, arguably France’s greatest living actress.  Moreau has made a career out of playing extreme, slightly perverse femme fatales, and has a rough physique and voice to match.  Neither beautiful nor feminine in the conventional sense of the word, Moreau has a magnetic quality that makes her an elusive object of desire, epitomised by her portrayal of Catherine in François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962).  As Duras, Jeanne Moreau is devastatingly convincing, quite possibly her most arresting performance to date.  It is her moving portrayal of a woman who has given everything to her art and who discovers true love in the winter of her life which vastly overshadows film’s other technical or artistic merits.

© James Travers 2004

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