La douleur réal. by Emmanuel Finkiel
2019; American Association of Teachers of French; Volume: 93; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tfr.2019.0169
ISSN2329-7131
Autores Tópico(s)Military, Security, and Education Studies
ResumoReviewed by: La douleur réal. by Emmanuel Finkiel Brigitte Stepanov Finkiel, Emmanuel, réal. La douleur. Int. Mélanie Thierry, Benoît Magimel, Benjamin Biolay. Cinéfrance 1888, 2018. Finkiel's 2018 film adaptation of Marguerite Duras's short stories "La douleur" and "Monsieur X, dit ici Pierre Rabier" is a poignant rendition of Duras's pain while waiting for the return of her husband, Robert Antelme, after his deportation during World War II. The film begins with a voiceover by Marguerite (Mélanie Thierry) reciting the incipit to her journal and stating not remembering having written this text, but knowing she had, thus anchoring the film to its original source. The English translation of Duras's title—Memoir of Pain (also appropriately translated as Memoir of War)—evokes a visceral kind of remembering that the film attempts to reproduce. Indeed, Finkiel's memory of the war through Duras is a collection of slow-moving scenes paced in such a way as to embody the protagonist's agonizing wait, allowing the spectator to fully appreciate the dilation of time. Whether or not Antelme will return is unclear until the end of the film. The moratorium we impose on our quotidian lives by watching the narrative unfold, unsure of how it will end, replicates the much longer suspension of life that is felt by the protagonist. Formally, Finkiel's La douleur remains true to the aesthetics of Duras's text. With an appropriately somber soundtrack that reflects the anxiety of the period, not all is explicitly said or represented in the film. Most notably, it questions the limits of representation by including blurry scenes that indicate an inability to show certain atrocities of war. Where in her text Duras describes [End Page 261] an emaciated prisoner come back from the camps as "autre chose, il reste très peu de lui-même, si peu qu'on doute qu'il soit en vie" (28), the film presents scenes dominated by bokeh (that is, a lack of focus) that conveys the indescribable encapsulated by Duras's autre chose. The scene in which Robert is carried back from Dachau, for instance, is entirely blurred in the film. In the text, Marguerite states how, upon his return, "cette forme [Robert] n'était pas encore morte, elle flottait entre la vie et la mort et on l'avait appelé, le docteur, pour qu'il essaye de la faire vivre encore" (61), even underscoring the "inhuman" feces he produces. And yet in the film, these elements are removed, since Robert's condition when he returns from the camps is unrepresentable. Residing between life and death, inhabiting the fault line between the human and inhuman, Robert is nothing more precise than a forme, unable to be visually represented in its vagueness with anything other than blurriness. In the final analysis, Finkiel's La douleur is a rich accompaniment to Duras's work, further probing how to depict atrocity and offering another look at the (in)human reality of World War II. Brigitte Stepanov Brown University (RI) Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French
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