L'homme atlantique

Cinema as a kind of impossibility, a final impasse which the film seems to consciously enact; in which image has been replaced almost entirely by sounded text; in which the desire for image and its withholding are paralleled to an ended or unrequited passion: a love letter, a letter of farewell, a philosophical meditation on the medium which read as a kind of relinquishment enacted in a mood of calm despair. The text, predominant here in a way that surpasses even Duras' previous films-the independent, non-diegetic soundtrack of 'India Song', the scripted rehearsals of 'Le Camion'-is a kind of address with no answer, addressed to 'vous', the 'Atlantic Man', constantly spoken to, never heard from, barely seen. For most of the running time all we see is black screen, with glimpses (outtakes from another Duras project) of the transitory space of the hotel, the man gazing out to sea or passing in front of a mirror which also captures the camera and its operator; shots of an open window and the rolling-in of the waves. All through, Duras' voice continues at the same speed, reflecting on the calling to presence or relegating to absence of her addressee, always addressing these thoughts to 'vous'. 'Vous' here might at first seem to refer to a generic performer-'actor' seems not quite the right word-one of those bodies Duras places in a space, to be glimpsed to the side, not quite illustration, not quite embodiment of a not-quite realised scenario presented as if in perpetual rehearsal ('Le Navire Night', 'Le Camion'). But with the appearance of the face-that of her companion Yann Andrea-and with the emotional tenor the text increasingly takes on, the film becomes more starkly personal, at once the potential for a kind of private revelation and a kind of private inscrutability, the self-enactment of a failure to communicate, a gap, a void. At the same time, the film forces us to ask whether the 'Atlantic Man' is Andrea 'as' himself, and as per his relation and meaning to Duras, or whether he's there as 'actor', as a generic or fictional personage, and what those distinctions might mean. (One litany describes 'vous' in terms of his attempt to distinguish himself from every other living thing, from the 'heap of men' 'hurling' themselves into annihilation through war and struggle or simple existence). Whether 'as' Andrea or, more capaciously, as 'vous', he becomes incarnation or ideal, representation of desire, of a loved or impossible object; the occasion for or of the painful emotions of any ending love story, yet in a more diffuse sense than that occasional scenario would imply. Duras pares visual content back to almost nothing, the 'poverty of means' mentioned in 'Le Camion' taken to an extreme more akin to structuralist film. Look until you go blind, try to forget, she instructs as the film opens-which, in the absence of image, sound like instructions to the audience as much as to anyone else; look into the camera, you'll forget it's there; forget yourself. Cinema as impossibility, impasse, relinquishment: not a calling to presence, but a willed self-forgetting; not a means of preserving the moment and movement of the performer, a benediction against death, but a register only of that moment's pastness, its annihilation.