La douleur

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 !

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..

I've watched some rubbish/flawed films and have found something to help me work around whatever was wrong with them. This film had nothing. It was slow, and boring. The characters weren't interesting me and I didn't like the cinematography. The overall look of the film was drab and grey.

The book isn't an easy read, it feels like being trapped into the author's head: this can be a problem because entering another person's subjectivity is always tricky and a source of misunderstanding.

The movie suffers from the same problem and this is why I didn't really like it. The voice over is extremely pervasive (we're bordering audiobook territory here) while nothing, or almost nothing, happens on screen.

In short, watching this movie without having read the book would be a pointless experience imho.

As usual, I am at odds with the idiots who inhabit places like Hollywood, and in their ignorance dare to review films of which they have little real understanding and a lot of subjective brouhaha! The film itself is a masterpiece of film making, which unfolds, like Sunset Song, the Scottish film of a few years back, in a thickly imaged, slow-paced narrative, the tormenting loss of a young woman's husband, the destruction of her youthful dreams due to war. We must remember that there is only one war, the war of the rich against the poor, the haves against the have-nots, the propertied against the vulnerable. The woman here is not simply any woman, of course, but Marguerite Duras, who was becoming on of the foremost novelists and screenwriters of the post war era, played to the hilt by Mlle Thierry who with this role comes into her own as of the foremost actresses of her generation. It's as good as Oldham's Churchill, that good. The detail of the film, not easy to achieve, is impeccable, every frame has been thought thru to the max. They deserved the Cannes for film editing with this one at the least. There is one frame, I really don't know how they achieved it, but I felt as if I was looking through a window in metal frame door, and not at the flat screen. I'd never seen anything quite like that. Again, at the end of one frame we hear what sounds like heavy breathing or crying, in the following frame we find that this is the sound of Duras' impassioned pen on the page. Utterly brilliant stuff. They had a great source and made a classic film with too many subtleties to recount here, especially to fans of an overpriced, horribly acted and written films like Bladerunner 2049 which are simply hyped junk with dependably high ratings on popular internet movie sites where folks speak depraved Hollywoodize.