Le Navire Night (1979)

 

Director: Marguerite Duras

Screenplay: Marguerite Duras

Cast: Dominique Sanda, Bulle Ogier, Mathieu Carrière, Marguerite Duras and Benoît Jacquot

An Abstract List Candidate

 

It's a black orgasm without touch.

This was my first Marguerite Duras film. The prolific novelist and theatrical playwright also made as much of her career as a director, and she is an imposing name, one warranting even a reference in John Water's filmography as a figure of high art, in probably the funniest joke of Polyester (1981) of drive-in cinema with proper cuisine and high art films being shown like Duras' in a triple bill, and regarded with significance in French cinema. Sadly, she is also a director who is not easily accessible, which defeats the point of her stature if we cannot access her work to gain from.

La Nauire Night, whilst deceptively so, is a very experimental film structurally which could be difficult to sell, but still engaged me as a narrative you could be enraptured by once you adapted to it. The catch is that, even with Dominique Sanda and Bulle Ogier in your cast, this is not a filmed narrative. Locations are seen, the first images of a home, but this is a story of potential romance told almost entirely in voiceover, where the only figure you ever see in context of these scenes telling the story being the main actors as themselves or a pianist. Only two voices in fact tell the narrative, a male and a female one, neither of them the main bankable cast either including Mathieu Carrière, but Duras herself and filmmaker Benoît Jacquot, over a camera panning through an old home as the film begins.

Some of these long takes of locations - a park, night-time with reflective green lights at night - are evocative, but others like the home can be reused as footage later on. This is the antithesis to when silent cinema used visual language entirely, as this uses language entirely to build the story onto the images rather than the images build the language entirely. It is not the most extreme of this type of filmmaking, as baring no actual images I think that belongs to Derek Jarman's beautiful swansong Blue (1993), entirely of a blue screen to match emotionally rich voiceover. La Navire Night does have a perverse edge as you have recognisable actors in French cinema onscreen, but they do not talk, do not role-play the drama, and have their most prominent moments in makeup chairs. They have become like the figures in Last Year at Marienbad (1961), haunting here as figures tangentially hovering around the film itself.

But the narrative, when you focus on it, is elaborate. In a world where lonely people build relationships over phones, a man encounters "F.", a woman who refuses to give her number but calls him continually after they first encounter each other. Meeting up in the flesh, she is an elusive young woman to him, her story shifting and mutating the longer she speaks. She is in one moment an illegitimate child; another with leukaemia, whilst her actual mother, a housekeeper, intervenes and the man starts to question who the real F. is. Even said actual mother may be part of a scheme. It is compelling, and not surprisingly that, whilst I know her more as an auteur director, Duras is as regarded in her homeland as an author of literature, and the poetic and emotional text spoken here is a testament to this, enticing in itself to her skill as the director-writer.

This production raises awareness of its artificiality. The leads, when seen, look like voice actors sitting around. You even see chalkboards at one point with Duras and Jacquot's lines on them in full. This is contrasted by how mysterious the film is, such as the continuously repeated shot of the camera pulling out of a red sparkling shirt as if this is David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986). The style is also successful as storytelling as, even if it is didactic and breaking down how a film is constructed, when you follow the narrative through the voices, shots of empty streets and empty park benches can still be pictured in the narrative, imagining the events being recounted played out with just the environments and filling them in with the characters themselves. The film has a mysterious edge in general which is compelling; beyond the plot points, where a mystery is surrounding who the illegitimate daughter of a servant woman actually is, then the tone of the romance is vast.

This is an avant-garde film which nonetheless uses the term "orgasm" a lot. Orgasms as sobs, empty but striking; "Their orgasm reaches murder" as the leads phone calls both bring together but emotionally wrecks F. and as much the male lead even if she is said to be the psychologically vulnerable one. The one scene which does feel like the cast is actually being used to role play just the mood of the narrative is Bulle Ogier laid on a bed on the floor in a semi-nude pose, evoking a visceral eroticism even in its matter-of-fact nature to connect to this narrative. It is melodrama, set in Neuilly, even if presented as high art, one that is just as compelling because of its structure forcing the viewer to have to interpret the material in this distinct way. The one moment it turns into a commentary, looking over a graveyard full of the dead from France's past, people of higher status, is particularly cutting by its existence in the film as Duras' leanings are clearly anti-bourgeois, dismissing the graves entirely and the status of those occupying them in ornate tombs and graves. It is, in knowledge of Duras' style being like this, a very enticing introduction as a result because she both cares for this high minded attitude to her work but basks in the emotional just as potently.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Distant/Introspective

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low