Le navire night

DVD - 2021

Writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras (L'Amant, India Song) explores the matrix of love, desire and language in her characteristically oblique and experimental style. The film's lovers are never allowed to meet in person, instead carrying out their conversations over the phone, using unlisted phone lines leftover from the German occupation of Paris. Elliptical sequences play out in empty streets, nocturnal cityscapes and shadowy interiors, linked together only by the spectral presence of the character's voices. At once dreamlike, intimate and fundamentally anonymous, this film challenges the conventional relationship between sound, image and narrative. A particularly uncompromising expression of Duras's subversive approa...ch to filmmaking, it stands to this day as an equally challenging and rewarding experiment in cinematic modernism. more