Nathalie Granger (1972)
Directed by Marguerite Duras

Film Review

Whilst it is certainly true that Marguerite Duras's filmmaking endeavours fall way short of her literary accomplishments, her idiosyncratic brand of cinema is not without interest, despite its occasional lapses into the worst kind of nombrilistic pretentiousness.  Duras became a film director in the mid-1960s, having scripted Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and Peter Brook's Moderato cantabile (1960), because she was unwilling to trust others with the adaptations of her written works.  One of her early screen offerings, Nathalie Granger has been too easily written off as an indulgence piece, partly because Duras filmed it entirely within the environs of her own home on the northern outskirts of Paris, but mainly because it impresses - at least on a first viewing - as a laboured and far too self-conscious exercise in style over substance.  It is only on repeated viewings that the film's obvious shortcomings diminish, allowing its deeper meaning and thoughtful artistry to become apparent. Far from being a vacuous art film that should be overlooked, it is one of Duras's most inspired and eloquent works for the cinema - and arguably the one that has most to say to an audience today.

Nathalie Granger is a film in which essentially nothing happens - at least on the surface.  It inverts Hitchcock's observation that 'drama is life with the dull bits cut out' and presents nothing but a stilted montage of dull bits, the languorous routine of two prematurely aged young women as they spend a few life-sappingly empty hours  together whilst awaiting their children's return from school.  The most daring sequence in the entire film depicts one of the women clearing a dining room table - it almost makes Carl Dreyer's films look as fierce and exciting as Quentin Tarantino's.  Getting little in the way of moral support from a frighteningly stone-faced Jeanne Moreau, an even more expressionless Lucia Bosé does her anxious mother bit, fretting inwardly over the fate of her wayward daughter Nathalie, who is presented as a raving psychopath of the Norman Bates ilk, but turns out to be, when we finally get to see her, a perfectly normal little girl.

The unstinting crushing ennui, which Duras manages to transfer from her two female protagonists to the spectator with consummate ease through a succession of painfully long static shots of frequently unpopulated sets, is momentarily relieved when a travelling salesman - in the guise of an adorable young Gérard Depardieu (just a few years before Bertrand Blier gave him his breakthrough role in Les Valseuses) - shows up and tries to sell a leading brand of washing machine.  Watching the life and confidence slowly drain out of Depardieu as he fails to establish any kind of rapport with the two women, who sit and gaze at him as though he were some unfamiliar and possibly dangerous species of bacterium, is one of the few joys the film has to offer.  At the end of it, the poor wretch is reduced to a fumbling wreck of a man and he is forced not only to admit defeat (of course the women already own the washing machine he is trying to sell them), but also to re-evaluate his whole life and ponder the point of existence in a viciously soulless universe.  And yet, bizarrely, having gone through this excruciating ordeal, he chooses to return and resume the one-sided conversation, so desperate is he to snatch some sliver of meaning from the meaningless void into which Duras has cruelly cast him.

And it is the utter, soul-wrenching, near-comical, pointlessness of everything that is the film's all-too-solemn gift to the unsuspecting spectator.  Duras's aims are perhaps a tad too obvious but we end up sharing her thesis that human beings, by their very nature as autonomous self-aware entities, can never fully be a part of the world that surrounds them.  Indeed, it is far easier to retreat inwards and become a prisoner in a self-constructed tiny cell of paranoia and complacency.  Duras reinforces this impression, perhaps less subtly than she might, with recurring mirror shots and menacing glimpses of the outside world through tantalising windows and doorways.  Not only do the protagonists (Moreau and Bosé) fail to connect with outsiders, they also appear incapable of connecting with each other.  They are like two characters in a Harold Pinter play who seem to be only half-aware of the other's existence and lack the equipment necessary to engage in even the most rudimentary form of conversation.

If the outer world does impinge on the women, it is only in an intensely negative way, through over-inflated fears of what this world contains - school officials who threaten the future of the titular Nathalie, devious con-artists posing as cute salesmen and deranged teenagers on a wild killing spree.  Whether this irrational fear is the cause of the women's social isolation or a result of it is hard to say, but it is the only thing they have to relieve the interminable monotony of their lives.  Made in the depressing aftermath of the May '68 uprisings in France, when politically conscious artists like Duras were apt to wallow in an understandably bleak collective pessimism, Nathalie Granger offers the grimmest picture of a world in which all notion of society has vanished and left us all terrifyingly alone, prisoners of our own self-nurturing neuroses.  It is a vision of the future pattern of human experience which now, forty years on, feels all too familiar.

Film Synopsis

Isabelle Granger is a young woman who lives with her husband and daughter Nathalie in a large house in the Yvelines district of Paris.  Hers is an ordered, mundane existence, which she shares with her equally bored woman friend.  Presently, Isabelle is preoccupied with the future prospects of her daughter Nathalie, who faces being expelled from school for her inexplicably violent behaviour.  The only solution is for the girl's mother to find her a place in a boarding school, so concerned is she not to see Nathalie's promise as a pianist go to waste.  As she mulls over her daughter's future one languid afternoon, Isabelle finds little solace in the company of her friend.  According to reports on the radio, there is a police manhunt under way in the area, to track down two violent adolescents who have gone on a killing spree.  The women's ennui is relieved momentarily when a young door-to-door salesman presents himself and tries, ineffectively, to sell them a washing machine.  Discouraged, the stranger takes his leave and Isabelle and her friend resume their tedious routine.  Nathalie returns from school with her friend Laurence and carries on her piano playing, blithely unaware of her mother's anxieties for her...