Memoir of War

(La douleur, Emmanuel Finkiel, France 2017, 127 min., DCP, French w/subtitles)

Rochester Premiere. In this haunting adaptation of Marguerite Duras’s semi-autobiographical novel, The War: A Memoir, the famed author (played by Mélanie Thierry) recounts an emotionally complex story of love, loss, and perseverance against a backdrop of wartime intrigue. In 1944 Nazi-occupied France, Duras is an active Resistance member along with her husband Robert Antelme and a band of fellow subversives. When Altelme is deported to Dachau by the Gestapo, Duras becomes friendly with French Nazi collaborator Rabier to learn of her husband’s whereabouts. But as the months wear on with no news of her husband, Duras must begin the process of confronting the unimaginable. Using subtly expressionistic imagery and voiceover passages of Duras’s writing, Finkiel evokes the inner world of one of the twentieth century’s most revolutionary writers.