Synopsis
In the last days of the Nazi-occupied France, writer Marguerite Duras awaits the return of her husband, Robert Antelme, arrested for being a Resistance fighter and then deported, while she maintains a tense relationship with her ambiguous lover and a dangerous game with a French collaborationist. Even when the Liberation arrives, she must still endure the unbearable pain of waiting.
Votre Filmothèque
Cast
- Mélanie ThierryMarguerite Duras
- Benoît MagimelPierre Rabier
- Benjamin BiolayDionys Mascolo
- Grégoire Leprince-RinguetFrançois Morland
- Emmanuel BourdieuRobert Antelme
- Anne-Lise HeimburgerMme. Bordes
- Patrick LizanaBeauchamp
- Shulamit AdarMme. Katz
- Joanna GrudzinskaThérèse
- Elsa AmielSecretary at Gallimard
Recommandations
- 100
RogerEbert.com
Among its many notable achievements, Memoir of War is one of the best films I’ve seen about the ways in which grief can pull a person in both directions simultaneously. Whereas the film’s first half plays more like a thriller, the second half proves to be an emotionally wrenching interlude perched on pins and needles. - 83
IndieWire
Anchored by a brilliant Mélanie Thierry, whose stone-eyed lead performance is at the center of almost every frame, Finkiel’s film never betrays the distance that Duras inserted between herself and her own experiences, or that she wrote from the perspective of a vessel as much as she did a subject. - 70
The Hollywood Reporter
Thierry is utterly convincing and compelling from first to last, in a deglamorized but sensual performance of tautly controlled severity and uncompromising rigor. - 70
Variety
Large as its historical canvas is, the film is most artful as an interior evocation of a preemptively grieving state of mind. - 60
The New York Times
Ms. Thierry plays Marguerite with an understatement that can be enigmatic, seductive, or deliberately confounding. The picture as a whole doesn’t do justice to her committed performance. - 60
Los Angeles Times
Resolutely somber, and self-aware about its deliberately tight and opaque visual style, it’s presentational more than lived, a series of filmmaking choices instead of something deeply felt and conveyed. - 50
Village Voice
While clearly adoring Duras’s work, Finkiel doesn’t credit the strength it took for her to ruthlessly detail the experience. - 45
Film Journal International
There are few elements of suspense or intrigue in this drama, as it’s largely an inward journey into Duras’ agonized, shaky state of mind over the unknown whereabouts of her Resistance-member husband, Robert Anselme.
