I Want to Talk About Duras
Vous ne désirez que moi
Claire Simon (2021)
When she read the book Je voudrais parler de Duras, writer-director Claire Simon told herself ‘This is completely unsuited to cinema – so let’s do it!’ The resulting film is showing at this year’s BFI Flare festival. A few minutes in, you may feel restless, that Simon’s first thought was right and her second a mistake. Once you accept, if you can, that I Want to Talk About Duras will carry on in the same vein, it becomes increasingly absorbing.
This is more or less a two-character piece and the subject is a couple’s relationship but only one individual is a member of both duos. He is Yann Andréa who, in his early twenties, became obsessed with the work and persona of the novelist, screenwriter and film-maker Marguerite Duras (1914-1996). After contriving to meet her, Andréa became Duras’s partner, despite the thirty-eight-year age difference between them, and they lived together at her home in Neauphle-le-Château, in the Yvelines department of northern France. A would-be writer and actor, Andréa appeared in one of Duras’s films, L’Homme atlantique (1981), but it wasn’t only on set that she directed him. She also told him how to live his life – what to eat, what to wear, who to see (or, usually, not see). She habitually belittled and sometimes hit him. The author and journalist Michèle Manceaux was a friend of Duras and a neighbour in Neauphle-le-Château. On two consecutive days in early December 1982, Manceaux came to Duras’s house to conduct taped interviews with Yann Andréa, as requested by him and, surprising as it may seem, with his partner’s approval. He wanted to talk about Duras.
Claire Simon’s script consists of the transcript of those interviews (or part thereof), published in book form after the deaths of Andréa and Manceaux (in 2014 and 2015 respectively). They’re played by Swann Arlaud and Emmanuelle Devos, who are marvellous. Arlaud, with his mobile, delicate features and suppressed nervous energy, suggests Yann’s anxious, exasperated sense of confinement but also his excitement at being the centre of attention and his relief at being listened to. And Devos is a superlative listener: as the confessional proceeds, she subtly conveys in facial movements both Michèle’s sympathy for Yann and her discomfort with what she’s hearing. It’s only fair to describe I Want to Talk About Duras as a two-hander but Arlaud and Devos aren’t quite the only people to appear on the screen. There’s also Marguerite Duras, an obscure figure glimpsed through a window in her house, although her presence registers more definitely in the film’s soundtrack – as footsteps downstairs from the room where Yann talks with Michèle and as the cause of a few interruptions to their conversation, when the telephone in the room rings (though Yann cuts the calls off). More important, the real Duras appears in a series of archive film clips – in interview, reading from her work, playing the piano, directing L’Homme atlantique. The force of personality that comes through in these clips fully lives up to Yann’s characterisation of Duras as an intimidating figure, easier to be compelled by than to like. Although he isn’t seen on the film set, he’s on the receiving end of Duras’s commands there. Insisting that he mustn’t try to act, she repeatedly barks out what serves as the motto of their off-set partnership: ‘Only do what I tell you’.
Another character is present for only a few minutes of screen time but, in what amounts to an interlude between the two interview sessions, serves to give context to Michèle Manceaux and to underline the oppressive claustrophobia of the Duras-Andréa relationship. At the end of the first day’s recording, Michèle walks back to her own house. It’s an ominous journey, past winter trees, in fading light. When she gets in, she needs warming up. She lights a fire and pours a drink before starting to play back the cassette recording to check that her ears didn’t deceive her when Yann referred to the sexual relations that he and Duras enjoyed. When she goes to bed, Michèle is unsettled. She sees in her mind the couple having sex (in the form of explicit ink drawings, by Judith Fraggi). Simon shoots these sequences to make the viewer very conscious of Michèle’s being alone and uneasy: they’re like the prelude to a murder or, at least, to the arrival of an unwelcome intruder. Instead, when a man suddenly appears and climbs into bed beside her, Michèle smiles and relaxes. The following morning, she’s up early to write; when the same man comes in and they exchange a few words, we don’t hear what’s said but it makes Michèle laugh. In his last appearance, he drops her outside Duras’s house and drives away. The easy affection between Michèle and the man is refreshing and relieving after the previous day’s interview, and before Michèle returns for a second helping of Yann. Her companion, as the cast list describes him, is played by Christophe Paou (best known internationally for Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake (2013)).
Before he met Marguerite Duras, Yann Andréa had at least one girlfriend, Bénédicte, whom he mentions to Michèle and who’s seen in one of the brief flashbacks with which Simon also punctuates the narrative. Despite this and his temporarily intense physical relationship with Duras, Andréa was gay. Another flashback shows him cruising in twilit woodland (recalling the landscape of Michèle’s journey home), where he meets another man (Philippe Minyana, the fourth and last actor credited in the IMDb cast list). Yann was born in 1952 so it’s not too surprising that, even in France, he was ill at ease with his sexuality and/or coming out. Much more startling is the strength of Duras’s homophobia. Simon includes footage of an interview where Duras discusses her 1982 novella La Maladie de la mort (in which a gay man hires a woman to stay with him in the hope of experiencing heterosexual love) and asserts her equation of homosexuality with ‘absolute death’. It seems she used Andréa’s sexual orientation as a stick to beat him with. Perhaps even literally …
Yann amusingly explains to Michèle that Marguerite’s attitude was the same regarding any of his tastes of which she disapproved: he equates homosexuality with eating leeks, since both were forbidden by her. Even so, Duras’s declared mission to ‘uncreate’ and ‘create’ Yann was centrally focused on his sexuality, as Simon makes clear in the original French title of her film (‘You desire only me’). There are fascinating questions raised by the project that Simon, reasonably enough, doesn’t even attempt to answer. How much had Duras dominated in her previous marital relationships? (Andréa, according to Wikipedia, was her third ‘spouse’.) Was her plan to remake Yann pre-meditated or something that developed solely because of his particular personality? It seems not unlikely that his idolisation of her was a big part of what made Duras see him as fair game for servitude but how did his homosexuality, much as she professed to loathe it, sharpen her reforming zeal and add spice to the undertaking? Was there more to ‘uncreate’ and potential for greater (re)creation than a straight man would have offered?
Marguerite Duras was a famous exponent of the nouveau roman in early post-war France. Her writing style was considered radical. She consistently opposed bourgeois social convention, which may partly explain the appeal to her of a romantic partner decades younger. Yet one of this film’s most striking features is how old-fashioned her views on sexuality already seem – a reminder of how much has happened in the quarter century since the end of her life. Perhaps this wouldn’t have changed Duras’s mind but, in seeing homosexuality as (worse than) a dead end, she wasn’t able to foresee same-sex marriage and parenting of children born through surrogacy. Writing this note, I’ve kept bumping into terms that are common parlance now but which it seems awkward to attach to attitudes and situations of forty years ago, when the words didn’t have the same currency. To say that Yann Andréa ‘identified’ as gay or was subject to his partner’s ‘coercive control’ somehow diminishes the perplexity he may actually have experienced.
I Want to Talk About Duras has sustained tension partly because you never stop being aware of how un-cinematic it essentially is – two people sitting in a room, one of them doing nearly all the talking. If it’s essential to drama that character is revealed through action – rather than through verbal description of past actions – then this film hardly qualifies as dramatic. Yet the challenge that Simon sets her actors and how they meet it, is engrossing to watch, and what Yann has to say extraordinary enough to hold your attention. One thing I’m not quite clear about: what did those involved intend should happen to the recordings made? Michèle Manceaux, who wrote for Marie-Claire at the time, comes to the interview armed with notebook as well as cassette recorder, and she jots things down. Yann looks both nervous and pleased to be talking to a proper journalist. Yet when the tape runs out at the second session, Michèle immediately announces, ‘That’s it’, and the interview stops. It’s suddenly as if she brought her journalist toys along to play a game that’s over now, and Yann’s post-interview behaviour hardly contradicts that impression. Michèle asks him for an envelope to put the two cassettes in before she hands them to him. The only envelope he can find is too small and he tells her to hold onto the cassettes for now. A voiceover then takes over. It explains that Yann never did get the tapes and summarises their afterlife of obscurity, until both people talking on them were no more.
That the interview recordings have conferred on Andréa and Manceaux a cultural life after death must please Claire Simon, who, according to her interview with Victoire Tuaillon which BFI used as the handout for this Flare screening, sees the Duras-Andréa folie à deux as inspired by a quest on both their parts for literary immortality. On the simpler matter of mortality, you can see on Duras’s Wikipedia entry a photograph of her grave in Montparnasse Cemetery, where it seems Yann Andréa too is buried: the gravestone, with a surrounding decoration of writing paraphernalia, bears the names and dates of them both. You’d like to think the shared resting place reflects something Yann wanted that Marguerite Duras was no longer in a position to overrule. More likely that her devoted companion took the view that, in death as in life, he should accede to her wishes.
20 March 2022