Le navire Night

'Le Navire Night': Night as ship, the talk at the end of sea but the shots of land, Duras' characteristic slow-panning camera the only waves there are those of wind amidst woods, grass, the baroque explosion of statues on the face of a chateau, streets deserted at night, empty at dawn, the space of human inhabitation free of their inhabitants. Instead, the mechanism of films, of theatre, of narration (the story told here was almost simultaneously released as a prose text, a play, and a film) is constantly drawn attention to: shots of a blackboard on which are written the lines we have just heard spoken; an early and mysterious shot of what is revealed to be the lighting apparatus for the shots we go on to see (above); a slow track across a red dress we then see Dominique Sanda wear; talk of the film that could not be made, as the actors seem in perpetual rehearsal, having make-up applied (by Duras' herself, her hands coming in from the edge of the shot as the actors appear to be about to speak, their mouths opening but remaining silent), asking her questions about the narrative they 're-create', closing their eyes as the story describes. In that story itself, we find characters rendered only by acronyms, Duras' perpetual man and woman, encountering each other through an unlisted telephone line and conducting an affair that, for years, is all talk-an endless phone conversation at night, a 'cry' that would be made worse, rather than solved, by meeting, even by the material trace of a photograph one sends the other; the woman dying of leukemia, an heiress, bed-ridden, forbidden to leave the house; once more, desire sublimated into endless stories, any or all of which may be true or untrue, landscape or urban-scape, the space of abandonment or habitation, characterised by Duras' slow-roving camera by perpetual absence. In the story-recited by Duras herself, along with assistant director Benoit Jacquot-the phone conversations are, in a sense, rehearsals for the meeting that never comes and would betray them; likewise, the presence of the actors in the house/'set' here do not so much enact roles or characters as hover on the edge of enactment, the shift from spoken word into visuality on which Duras' films and which she seems to distrust. All the elements of film-words, actors, faces, settings, lighting, costume-are presented as separate entities-a musician is occasionally glimpsed or heard like a whisper playing a simple piano figure, echoing the endless melody of 'Baxter, Vera Baxter'-the film carrying on after the end of the story to describe the impossibility of making, or ending a film (the same thing); ships that pass in the night or the ship that passes in the night, talking against absence, death, across the distance those very words maintain.

Here we have Marguerite Duras' film or anti-cinema of a relationship between a man and a woman who relate to one another over a telephone line. Why anti-cinema, well Duras wants the images to happen in your mind more than on the screen. This is why she gives us "images passe-partout", mostly landscape shots or shots of people thinking, which you could layer many narratives on top, which you have to use as a springboard. We also should have to conjure up the conversations of the pair, we are given only a fragmentary idea of what they talk about. What do two people who fall in love over the telephone talk about? The juvenile in me says phone sex, but I think that's not the point here; this is about souls reaching out across the void.

It's a distraught film, full of desire. Pierre Lhomme's photography and Duras' work bring to life the friezes and statues of Paris so that you're almost in the state the sculptors must have been in. More, you tend to feel the unbridgeable distance between each sculpture.

Conventional thinking says that we ought to forget the desires which we cannot consummate, that we ought not to listen to the cries in the nights of the other abandoned souls, we ought to focus on practical love, on achievement in material wealth, in temporal activities. In the world of Duras however there exists only the anguish of souls' unslaked desire for others. For this reason many revile her, whilst many others exult her, and in the middle a legion of those simply confused by the experimental nature of her movies.

What gets in the way of the two lovers, a leukaemia, which in large part feels metaphorical, and a patriarch, the enormously wealthy and influential father of F.

Occasional flashes of political thought are judiciously added, Duras speaks derisively of the inhabitants of the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, Napoleonic bankers and generals - selfish complotters, puppeteers. The world they have created one where love is seeded on rocky ground.

What lingers long after, is the hypnosis of Duras' voice, black tulip lamps, black cast iron park benches, a tumult of feeling, the dancing violin of Amy Flamer.

A huge let-down to audiences at the time, Marguerite Duras' follow-up to her lush and flamboyant India Song is a very different film indeed. Telling the story of two tragic lovers who never meet (the girl is dying of leukemia and daren't risk face-to-face contact) Duras sets out to communicate this 'faceless' relationship to her audience by - and you really won't believe this unless you see it - barely even photographing the glamorous trio of actors she has hired to star.

So if your notion of sheer cinematic bliss is gazing raptly at Mathieu Carriere or Dominique Sanda (OK, I admit it, mine is) then be warned that Le Navire Night may give you a nasty shock. Long motionless takes of the three actors having their make-up put on or wandering - barely visible - round shadowy rooms. For most of the film, the camera pans along deserted Parisian boulevards, or pores over a luscious red dress hanging on a wall. At the end, Duras announces in voiceover that "the story was never shot."

True, on a purely literal level. Yet the sense of frustrated longing that sustains both non-lovers through their passionate non-affair...if we don't experience that through the methods Duras uses here, why not? Are we incapable of feeling unless we are prompted by the prescribed visual image? Or are we (as Susan Sontag feared) so saturated by images that we can no longer feel at all? To try and put it more simply, why is Marguerite Duras' way of telling this story any less valid than the conventional techniques that we, as a film audience, expect and demand?

Our answer to that question says little about Duras and her film, and everything about us. Why do we feel the need to reduce an emotional tragedy to a visual image? Is it morally acceptable for a film to do that? At once a negation of cinema as it is, and a reaffirmation of what cinema might be, Le Navire Night is a film to be watched with heart and mind and senses wide open. Or not watched at all.