La douleur

"Memoir Of War" is a woman's picture in the true sense of the term. Women can understand the agony of waiting for their husband or other male relative to return from war, or in this case, from a concentration camp. Waiting and waiting and waiting - for some word, some hope, some encouragement. Daily trips to the train station provide no help as day after day goes by. Melanie Thierry is outstanding as Marguerite, who waits patiently for her husband to return. The war is over and she scans the returnees at the train station each day.

It is not a war picture in the strict sense of the term and there are no battle scenes, or even a fight worth mentioning. It is a character study ... but c'mon. Enough is enough. The film could have used a heavier hand in the cutting room, as it is about 30 minutes too long. I was beginning to hope he would show up dead or alive and end the interminable wait. I base my rating on the caliber of the acting performances, especially Ms. Thierry and Shulamit Adar, who plays a neighbor who comes to stay with her. But for these outstanding performances I would have opted for a six rating.

7/10 - Website no longer prints my star rating.

On paper, this film is condemned and doomed to failure. A story about a writer (Marguerite Duras) and her internal dialogs about the waiting of her husband's return (member of the French resistance) could only be seen as something rather repellent. However, the fact that Emmanuel Finkiel delivers a heartbreaking film about this waiting is in itself astonishing and makes this film valuable, rare and beautiful for sure among the must see films' list of 2017. So how come did Emmanuel Finkiel end up with such a good movie ? Well there are several ingridients of course , but one of the secrets leans on the fantastic actors the film features and the way the characters were written: Melanie Thierry as Marguerite Duras of course, way above all the rest, so unsettling and seductive, torned apart and brave, but also, quite surprinsgly Benoit Magimel (recently so deep and good actor in recent years) with a deep twisted role of a cop you never end up to decipher completely. All this is accompanied by a beautiful and genuine reconstruction of the ocuppied Paris back in the early forties and the creative camera inventions the director resorted to during the film actually allow to maintain the supense you would not have expected from such a movie by revealing little by little the diferent feelings Marguerite Duras (the writer) came through (specially her twisted feeling towards her lover and the husband she must wait). Thanks to all this we can comprehend the unexpected turns of the historical events through the eyes of a "resistante" (Marguerite Duras), we live the waiting, the environment, the mood o the people in the ocuppied Paris, the suffering of the people, the watershed of history when the fear suddenly changed sides, the political commitment that some people decided to have and the one that others decided to avoid at all cost, all this is perfectly pictured, illustrated, narrated described and depicted with a true authenticity that never bore us despite the theme of the film. Melanie Thierry once again is just amazing (quite unfair not to give her the Cesar award for that utterringly good performance), we suffer with her, and never abandon her pain (the real title in French means pain). A great adaptation on screen and a very emotional moment . I recommend !

"In Paris, I found myself surrounded by Germans; they were all over the place. They played music, and people would go and listen to them! All along rue de Rivoli, as far as you could see from place de la Concorde, there were enormous swastika banners five or six floors high. I just thought, This is impossible." Pearl Witherington Cornioley

While many on all sides of WWII suffered immeasurably, along with them was Marguerite (Melanie Thierry), not suffering the physical slings but emotionally tortured waiting for the return during liberation of her imprisoned resistance husband, Robert (Emmanuel Bourdieu). Memoir of War is a slow burn of waiting, expertly paralleling her longing for his return as we suffer a long but engrossing expectation with her.

Director/writer Emmanuel Finkiel, skillfully adapting the discursive Marguerite Duras novel, based on her experience, provides a linear story that simmers with desire for Robert's return while she spurns attention from a resistance colleague, Dionys (Benjamin Biolay), and a Nazi collaborator Pierre Rabier (Benoit Magimel). Finkiel's constant closeups of her cinematic face reveal the subtle torture she goes through as she spurns Dionys's advances and barters with Rabier for her husband's return.

After the Rabier sequences, the film almost exclusively centers on her turmoil of waiting until a denouement worthy of a potboiler depicting the converging conflicts of her loyalty in the face of Robert's imminent return. The film successfully immerses us in her waiting and her conflicts, as anyone who has, for instance, endured the slow death of a loved one to a disease. I suspect that torture is similar to waiting for a prisoner to return, probably a skeleton of himself looking already close to death if not almost there already.

Memoir of War, depicting the life of an acclaimed memorist, novelist, and author of the classic Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), is not for the frequently ADD American audience (admittedly, it is too long for almost any audience); it belongs to the province of thoughtful cinephiles who love the quiet characterization of grand souls in conflict.

Superhero film this is not; classic European filmmaking with a substantial heroine it is.

SUM UP : you read the book and liked it ? -> GO see the movie! Not read or read and not liked? -> GO see another movie!

STORY The story is about a wife that has no information about the return of her husband that went to war. So she tries to find out what happend to him.

NOTHING BUT PAIN The film is full of pain, and is very slow, just l ike the book I heard. I would say that, while the crew might have done a great job turning the book into a move, the movie was not enjoyable: I go to movies to feel emotions, and I did not feel any but pain in this one. I had to leave the movie after 1H30 min because I was just losing my time.

RATING 4 because the cast was nice, and as said, the crew did a fine job given the book..

War causes pain in many ways. La douleur focuses on one that usually goes unnoticed. It is a character study of Marguerite, a woman waiting for her husband who has been arrested by the Germans and nobody knows what happened to him. Is he alive? Is he dead? The only thing she can do is torturously wait without having any clue. She desperately tries to get a French agent's help, but deep inside she knows it's a vain attempt.

The movie succeeds in creating the surreal feeling of "freezing time". Days are endlessly passing by and she isn't living, she is just a detached observer. This effect is done through the extremely slow narrative, Melanie Thierry's performance, the camera work (e.g. Many closeups, or the scene where she looks herself in the mirror, an outsider in her own life).