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Gallic avant-gardists make great zombie movies—Rivette locates the screwball comedy of the bourgeois morts vivant in Celine and Julie Go Boating, Marguerite Duras sees a slow, arching valse in which the soundtrack goes its own way. A setting sun like a blood drop, tennis courts, chandeliers, silk and lace, an imperial clock. "What is that scent of flowers?" "Leprosy." The camera prowls the embassy, down staircases and past lush gardens while murmurs drift from elsewhere. "Can't bear it? No, can't bear it. India, can't bear it." People materialize at last, swells in Thirties gowns and tuxes, consuls and attachés and servants, Duras' phantoms. Delphine Seyrig in shimmering red frock holds court, sort of, taking languid waltzing turns with a company of mannequins (Claude Mann, Mathieu Carrière, Vernon Dobtcheff, Didier Flamand). Do they exist when the camera is not on them? The eye-watering abstraction is from Last Year at Marienbad, the horror of memory, of muted passion and muted suffering. "Rien" is a terrifying word. Incantations of rains and heat, "the only remedy: immobility." One of the atrophied ghouls (Michael Lonsdale) rebels with emotion and is ousted, screaming unforgettably as the object of his desire poses before a wall-sized mirror. (Ophüls originally envisioned Madame de... as a story reflected on polished surfaces.) In this bifurcated journey, images remain pinned in place while sounds trek to Rangoon, the Ganges, Lahore, Savannakhet, wherever displaced longing and colonial guilt are needed. An archaic foxtrot swoons over and over, "a sort of pain is linked to music..." Duras composes tableaux in which drifting smoke or ceiling fans become the most dynamic players, still her rarefied screen gradually accumulates humidity and odors. "When will this end?" "With your death, I imagine." A wondrously sensory work, not minimalism but hypnotism. Cinematography by Bruno Nuytten.
--- Fernando F. Croce |