La Douleur (2018)
Directed by Emmanuel Finkiel

Film Review

A decade before her death in 1996, the world-renowned French writer Marguerite Duras published an account of the most agonising period of her life, when she  desperately hoped to be reunited with her husband after he was deported towards the end of the Occupation.  Few women authors of her century wrote so intensely and so movingly about female passions as Duras, and this autobiographical work, La Douleur, ranks alongside her Goncourt Prize winning novel L'Amant as one of her immense literary achievements.

In his ambitious adaptation of Duras's most personal work, director Emmanuel Finkiel makes a determined effort to transpose its author's intense inner pain to the big screen but, as several other capable filmmakers have discovered before him, Duras's text proves stubbornly resistant to a cinematic treatment.  After Jean-Jacques Annaud's still-born L'Amant (1992) and Rithy Panh's tepid Un barrage contre le Pacifique (2009), Finkiel's La Douleur does a somewhat better job of visualising the sentiments that Duras expresses so powerfully in her writing, but it falls somewhat short of being an outright masterpiece.

Sensibly, Finkiel doesn't attempt to adapt the whole of Duras's novel but instead concentrates on its two most important episodes - its author's ambiguous affair with a French officer in the Gestapo and her agonising wait for the return of her deported husband after the Liberation.  Even this hefty truncation poses something of a challenge for the writer-director, however, and instead of a single coherent narrative what we effectively have are two one-hour long films which look as if they have been badly soldered together at the last minute.

The first half of La Douleur is by far the most interesting and could easily have been expanded to the length of a single feature (with far better results).  Once the narrative switches at the mid-point, a heavy sense of ennui suddenly descends on the film and we rapidly lose interest in the protagonist as she desperately awaits the return of her husband whilst the world around her melts into a haze of confusion in the midst of the chaotic Liberation.  It is as if the entire film has suddenly gone out of focus and we are left struggling for something to hold onto as it lumbers lethargically through sixty life-sapping minutes of runtime.

Finkiel's efforts may not be entirely successful but he deserves some credit for what he does manage to achieve in adapting a work which (like most of Duras's literary output) is pretty unamenable to a dramatic interpretation.  The one fatal mistake he makes is to rely so heavily on voiceover narration to carry Duras's distinctive voice.  Rather than adding to the visuals and stressing the author's abject inner turmoil this over-exploited device merely weighs the film down, deadening its emotional power and leaving it feeling like the most desiccated and hollow expression of a soul in torment.

On a more positive note, Finkiel brings to the film the same visual flair and cool lyricism that is so evident on his highly acclaimed first feature Voyage (1999), which won him the Prix Louis Delluc, and his subsequent Nulle part, terre promise (2009) and Je ne suis pas un salaud (2016), both highly recommended.  There is a cold, austere beauty to La Douleur, the muted palette of greys and browns so eerily evocative of the era in which the film is set, and yet even this feels over-done, cruelly subduing the intense passions that Duras describes so graphically in her great book.

The one area where the film cannot be faulted is the acting.  Certainly in the film's first half, where there is a sustained narrative focus and Finkiel gets as close as he can to Duras's primal emotions, the performances are utterly compelling, particularly from the leads Mélanie Thierry and Benoît Magimel.  Thanks to a remarkable make-up job, Thierry bears a frighteningly close physical resemblance to Duras, but what is far more impressive is how the actress manages to project the writer's complex inner persona, making her appear not just a being of immense intellect but also an ordinary woman coping as well as any other human being in her position might with some very basic needs and desires.

As Duras's Gestapo lover, Benoît Magimel presents us with an even more bewildering portrait of human complexity.  Despite his despicable exterior and sinister cold demeanour, Magimel's character exerts a spell-bounding power over us, and we can see immediately just why Duras might have fallen for such an obnoxious creature - he is the living personification of the fractured identity of France at the time of the Occupation.  Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet deserves a special mention for his humane portrayal of a young  François Mitterand (known here by his Resistance codename Morland) - another alluring and contradictory character who deserves far more screentime than Finkiel deemed fit to offer him.

On its French release in January 2018, La Douleur garnered some very favourable reviews and was subsequently nominated for eight Césars in 2019 (in categories that included Best Film and Best Director), although it failed to win a single award.  Whilst it has much to commend it on both the acting and photography fronts, it is far from being an unqualified success, marred as it is by a needlessly verbose screenplay, a lack of genuine passion and some overly self-conscious direction, to say nothing of its excruciating over-reliance on voiceover waffle and background music.  Whilst it may be a challenge to sit through its wearying second half, the film nevertheless succeeds in evoking that soul-crushing sense of loss you feel when you are separated from the one you love - albeit far less powerfully than in Duras's original novel.

Film Synopsis

In June 1944, France is still under Nazi occupation.  The 30-year-old writer Marguerite Antelme waits anxiously for news of her husband Robert after he is arrested and deported on account of his resistance activities.  Her distress is not helped by the secret love affair she has been pursuing with a close friend of her husband, Dyonis Mascolo.  Marguerite is prepared to do anything to discover what has become of Robert, even taking as her lover a French agent of the Gestapo, Pierre Rabier.  Marguerite's distress does not end with the Liberation of France by the Allies.  As the deportees return to the country, the writer lives in a permanent state of tension, anticipating the return of her husband as a mood of excitement and recrimination overtakes the French capital...