Melanie Thierry is rarely off screen in this film version of Marguerite Duras' account of her scarcely bearable wait for her husband's release from Nazi concentration camps. Thierry's performance holds the film together despite its 'split' structure.
The first half is all about her contact with a French Nazi who is in a position of power over her husband's fate. This ambiguous connection builds intriguingly but then stops suddenly with little sense of resolution.
The second half records Duras' prolonged and exhausting wait for news of her husband.
The film is very faithful to the lived experience of those French citizens who defied the Nazi occupation. The individual tragedies are placed in the foreground, and Thierry's face is painfully eloquent.
If you like slow arty French films where everyone smokes endlessly and looks philosophically into the middle distance spouting poetry, you'll be in heaven with this.
Me, I liked bits of it, when it focused on the story and events. Supposedly based on truth.
All about Paris in the latter stages of WWII. The wait for those who may or may not return from POW or concentration camps in Germany.
Some bits are baffling. The issue of how many French collaborated with the German regime has never ever really been explored much on screen, and it is good to have a glimpse of that here, at least.
2 stars