La Musica

Duras - intricacy of ideas and dialogues + Vierny - precise black and white camera that turns an otherwise "literary" film into an aesthetically smooth affair. In fact, even Vierny's camera for Hiroshima Mon Amour, based on Duras' motifs + excellent performances by Delphine Seyrig and the character of Count de Peyrac, was a classic (great) piece from the 60s. However, words and gazes do the main work in this film - a film about fading and reawakening desire lightly plays with hints and inscrutability, which best evokes desire: a riddle always entices more than the obviousness of the revealed, ambiguous words of a mysterious stranger lure more than his appearance, the melancholically purposeless gaze of a mature femme fatale more than the barrenness of beautiful youth, and above all - the dark and still unresolved past fuels desire much more than a certain future. Duras traps both the main characters and the viewer in a trap of time and the desire to experience something new, the desire to find something unknown in the another (a dialectic that can dangerously oscillate between both poles, between falling in love and horror at the otherness of the other). Mirrors and words split the pair into a quartet, splitting the present into the past and the future... (01/20/2016)