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Cet Amour-La

2001, Movie, NR, 98 mins

Cet Amour-La: Review

CET AMOUR-LA
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This strange-but-true tale of a December-May romance involving an older woman and a man 36 years her junior is notable for two reasons: The woman in question is writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras, famous in cinema circles for having written the enigmatic screenplay from which Alain Resnais' groundbreaking HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR (1959) was made. The other incentive to sit through Josee Dayan's pretentious but gorgeously photographed look at the last 16 years of the writer's life is that the timeless Jeanne Moreau plays Duras. True to the self-obsessed insularity of passionate affairs, Dayan remains focused on the intense, often anguished, relationship between Duras and her lover, Yann Andrea (played here by Aymeric Demarigny), an aspiring writer and devoted fan generally credited with rousing the ill and alcoholic Duras into a final burst of creativity. By the time Andrea moves into Duras' gloomy, shuttered apartment on the Normandy coast in the summer of 1980, he had been writing to his idol for five years, often several times a day. Andrea enters her lonely sanctuary urging her to finish the story of Theodora Katz, a manuscript Duras had long ago set aside and forgotten. While his intrusion terrifies her, she asks Andrea to stay and serve as her secretary. Andrea is thrilled to play a part in the writing process of the great Duras — she dictates while he hunts and pecks the keys of an old, WWII-era typewriter — and even though she suspects he's more enraptured with the writing than the writer, Duras takes him to bed. The relationship isn't an easy one. To combat her chronic insomnia, Duras begins drinking with gusto, and the red wine only worsens an already temperamental spirit: She throws Andrea out, she takes him back, she loves him, she hates him, she gives him something to do with his life. Andrea, meanwhile, cheats on his lover, tells her she looks like a whore, belittles her fading fame and sticks by her when she enters rehab and finally succumbs to cancer in 1996. Based on Andreas's account of the affair Cet amour-la (Duras published hers as Yann Andreas Steiner), the dialogue often sounds like a parody of Duras — on her deathbed, the grand dame of French letters actually gasps, "Duras c'est fini!" — and Demarigny never quite transcends his character's creepy edge to make him actually likeable. Moreau, however, who knew Duras quite well and starred in no fewer than four films based on the writer's work, perfectly embodies her friend, and is thoroughly magnificent. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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