|
Old Acquaintance as tableau vivant. The fairy-tale's gingerbread manse is played by Marguerite Duras' own checkerboard-tiled cottage, Jeanne Moreau and Lucia Bosé slog around in it, a pair of spent sorceresses. The tone is one of post-traumatic numbness, abstracted as an afternoon spent washing and drying dishes, burning leaves in the backyard, contemplating a pond's dirty water, trading fragmented pensées. A child (Valerie Mascolo) is said to be ill-tempered and unhappy, "sometimes she wants to kill everybody... She wants to be an orphan, a Portuguese maid." Somewhere beyond the frame lurk murderers and cops, the radio tells the tale: "The woods are quiet now. There is a deep mist. The young killers seem to sleep from exhaustion." As if from another planet, in drops an awkward washing-machine peddler (Gérard Depardieu), whose small storm of nervous activity plays like an audition before the two head-shaking, lugubrious divas. ("You're no salesman." "But I have a license...") An uncanny bit of chamber music, hands on a keyboard not quite matching the tinkling on the soundtrack, a hard, scrubbed image decorated with mirrors, dolls and cats, a triad of associations at the service of unspoken (unspeakable?) dilemmas. Ambling in and out of this acerbic, eloquent feminine psyche, Depardieu's mystified outsider and Durasian homme tremblant can only follow a shaggy monologue about life's many jobs with a gag about transitory happiness ("it lasted fifteen days"). What Duras takes from Secret Ceremony Losey returns in La Truite. With Luce Garcia-Ville, Nathalie Bourgeois, and Dionys Mascolo. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |